Nothing Ventured
by JMK758
Summary: Cheryl Keitt and Darla Ventura plan a vacation in the hills and find death and worse. Please review.
1. Renovations

This is my twenty-fourth NCIS Mystery and the fourth of my Third Season (as well as being a milestone, my 70th story posted here). The list of stories got so extensive I moved it, with summaries, to my profile.  
The usual legal disclaimers apply. I don't own anyone except Rev. Siobhan McGee and original Agents.  
Please Review.  
Rating: T or NCis-17.

Nothing Ventured  
By JMK758  
Chapter One  
Renovations

"I still wish you'd called," Cheryl Keitt insists for what feels like the twentieth time as she navigates her car up the snaking mountainside road near Webster Springs, Maryland. The road is two lanes but, while ascending, she still feels like she's inches from plummeting from the cliff's edge beside her. Still, despite Darla's familiarity with this road, she's less afraid when trusting in her own driving rather than her sister's skills.

There are too few straight stretches, too many turns, rises and dips, usually the three in some mad combinations, for her taste. She knows seclusion had been the motivation for Bob's building their getaway here but she could wish for a little less indulgence.

"Rob will love seeing you," Darla Ventura assures her, oblivious to her sister's concern. "Besides, I really want to show you all the work he did all winter renovating the house."

"_You _haven't even seen it," Cheryl points out, her eyes locked on the twisting, arching road.

"All the better, I can be surprised and show it off at the same time."

Cheryl gives up. She hadn't felt comfortable since learning, partway through her own 4-hour portion - the last leg now - of the nearly two-day drive from Brooklyn to Maryland, that her brother-in-law has no idea she's coming to join them for the weekend.

It's one thing to drive her own car, Darla had left hers behind, saying there's no need for three cars up there when Bob has his, but Cheryl realizes she should've anticipated her sister's thoughts - or perhaps lack of them - and made alternate arrangements. It's typical of Darla to do something thoughtless like this.

Darla and Robert haven't seen one another since he'd embarked upon this season-long project of renovating the summer getaway cottage. He'd begun just after New Year's and now, on March 19, Darla declares the finished product ready for review; but the more she considers this, the less confident Cheryl feels about her sister's determination. As well as she gets on with him, Cheryl's sure Robert must have particular plans for Darla in the secluded mountainside retreat, plans that do not involve visitors.

Had she known this was her flighty sister's two-pronged surprise, she'd never have accepted the invitation. She resolves not to unpack until she has Robert's unequivocal invitation.

She doubts she's going to get it.

x

"How long until Bob's Leave is up?"

"He goes back on the 31st."

Cheryl dares spare only a startled glance. "That's twelve days!" 'Counting what's left of this evening, that is.' "Don't you two want some, you know, _alone time_?"

"It's okay; we'll have plenty after the weekend's over."

Cheryl gives up, concentrating on the treacherous driving and hairpin turns with the valley seeming inches from the edge of her tires. Coming down the hill she'd be in the hillside lane, but the climb allows her glimpses of doom. The guard rail seems too low for the treacherous road and the late afternoon sun doesn't help; occasionally it shines in her eyes, at other times the car turns toward the hill and she must adjust to the diminished light. The only thing worse than driving this broken-back snake of a road in the late, late afternoon would be traversing it in the dark. She's never done it and has no intention of tonight being the first time. She hopes she can stay until morning before bidding a hasty though hopefully graceful adieu.

Otherwise, this is going to be a long weekend.

x

Still, it's not a bad vista - at least for the instants she can spare a glimpse for it. She'd much rather her flighty sister was driving.

She changes her mind immediately. If Darla treats driving this road with the same attention and responsibility she lavishes on everything else in life, Cheryl will sing her next Aria with the Celestial Choir.

The trees to their right are sparse to non-existent, apparently never having gained a foothold in the rocky ground. Up above, where the soil is richer high on the hill's southern side, the trees are budding, winter white replaced by spring green. Where individual trees are still lacking, looking up through the curtain of ascending forest to her left reveals a green haze of renewing life.

She wishes she could enjoy it.

x

It's not soon enough when she sees the blue and white house set into the hill. When she turns into the driveway carved into the hillside, she makes sure to leave enough room in the drive for Bob to pull in beside her. She's mildly surprised not to find his car already there and says so to her sister.

"Probably in town. I'll call him when we get inside."

Cheryl's relieved. If he can learn of her visit by phone, she'll have time to make a graceful exit to some motel before he returns and avoid a scene. Though she'd hate to leave, there's still enough sun time to reach town, even at a crawl down the hill.

Looking at the house, unable to tear her mind from the formidable drop behind her, she looks back over her shoulder. The vista is spectacular - if you have no problem with heights - but there's something to be said for level ground.

The wooden bungalow before her, however, is homey. Royal blue trimmed in white, it could have contrasted with the green wood bursting into life but instead seems integral with it. The property had to be excavated from the hillside; the house is level but except for the paved parking area the lawn leading to it is that same formidable slope. There's a level rear lawn, she knows from previous visits, but the hill resumes as a back wall forty feet from the rear door.

"Well, let's get unpacked," Darla says, opening her door.

x

The climb, even burdened with bags of groceries from the town far below, then another trip for luggage, isn't taxing. At the end of the slate rock walkway their sneakers crunch on the three foot wide skirt of white gravel that surrounds the blue wooden house. The air is fresh, tart and crisp, carrying pine and more upon a steady cool March wind no molecule of smog would dare to corrupt.

Inside, brown wood, not paneling like you'd buy in the city but the real thing, says 'cozy' and Cheryl remembers why her brother-in-law had bought this house. Darla had frequently described it as an idyllic retreat, an opinion Cheryl had agreed with on her few visits. The living room is comfortably appointed, not crowded with possessions, but looks much different than she remembers it from last summer.

"He took out the left wall," Cheryl observes, looking about. That's an easy one to notice; originally they would go through a door into the kitchen, but now the living room and kitchen form a vast open space. "What else?"

Darla sets down the last suitcase and looks about as well, but Cheryl notices her sister's inspection is more critical. "The patio out there," she points to the door beyond the kitchen, "had to be weatherproofed. It got dreadfully cold at night - hopeless if we're going to be here after Fall. But there's not as much as I thought. New drop ceiling..." They'd been able to see up to the inverted V of the wooden roof, now the ceiling is a little more than eight feet high, just above the door tops. "Should be easier to keep warm," Darla grants, though her expression shows she's displeased with this innovation.

Through the door before them is the right bedroom, left den and bathroom in the middle. Darla had mentioned she'd been afraid he'd turn the place into a bachelor pad, but he hadn't undone _too _many of her improvements from past years, and whatever he might have done to them will be set right before her week's vacation is over.

They stock the refrigerator, neither woman surprised at the inadequacy of the supplies already stowed. "I guess it was enough for him," Cheryl observes.

"He probably knew I'd bring a proper amount. Look, while I call him and make dinner, why don't you get some sleep? You're tired."

Cheryl would like to deny it but the trip from New York, two days of driving alternated between the sisters, had been more of a strain because she's no longer sure of her welcome. If she's going to drive down to find a motel on the highway... "Okay."

x

Darla has to push hard on the bedroom door. "Still sticks," Cheryl notes as Darla pushes it closed again. She remembers it always had.

"I guess he didn't get to everything." She will, however.

The bedroom isn't much changed except for the drop ceiling. The left window looks out the rear of the house toward the hillside 'wall', the far window to the building's right side. This positioning keeps the light down, sunset is to the front of the house, dawn hidden by the mountain, helpful for sleep, but what matters most to Cheryl is that the double bed looks inviting.

Cheryl sits on the bed while she and Darla talk for about twenty minutes until drowsiness eventually overtakes her.

"I'll wake you just before dinner," Darla assures her.

"You're _sure _Bob won't mind?" If she does stay, it'd be on the living room couch. There is no way she'll deny the man his own bed - and his long-absent wife - so this may be the only chance she'll have to be comfortable.

"He'll love seeing you," Darla repeats, leaving her alone, pulling the door firmly into place.

Cheryl hopes Darla knows her husband's affections as much as she thinks she does, but she doesn't believe it. Nevertheless, she removes her jacket, puts it in the closet and starts to undress.

x

Darla sets to reorganizing the house. Her chair isn't where it belongs, the table that was across the room has to be returned and exchanged for the one Bob put in the wrong place, and the small bookcase should be against _that_ wall. Bob doesn't really need the magazine rack right next to his easy chair, that's too much of an indulgence. The pictures above the television belong on the right wall and vice versa...

She then turns her attention to dinner, but the cans in the cupboards under the sink and above the stove aren't where they belong and she spends a lot of time fixing them properly.

She opens the far kitchen door to the enclosed patio. "Come on, this won't do." Though he'd done a lot of work winterizing the room, none of the furniture is right. Putting things back in the right places takes quite a bit of time and effort.

Finally, satisfied that things are almost where they belong, she picks up the phone on the counter by the front door and punches in Bob's cell number.

It takes him his usual long time to answer, just before the call would go to voice mail.

"Hi, honey."

/Darla? You in?/

"Just got here." The sun is starting to set, but she doesn't need to tell him that she's been here for a long while. Let him be surprised by her improvements and reparations.

/Look, I'm going to be in town longer than I thought. Why don't you get some rest?/

"Why?"

There's a pause. /Because it was a long drive./

"No, I mean why will you be late?"

/Oh. Strucker's doesn't have the wood I need in yet, the truck is late. Rather than coming all the way back in the morning, I told him I'd wait./

She looks out the window. The sun is already dipping into the valley and rising along the living room wall, already past the horizontal. The trees surrounding them are cloaked in each other's shadows and any self-respecting animal is already turning in for the night. "Is it that important? You know how I hate these roads after dark."

/You're not driving. Get some rest, I'll be there soon./

"Good. I have a big surprise for you."

/A surprise?/

"In the bedroom."

/Ah, in the _bedroom_./

She grins at his hopeful tone. If only he knew. "You'll see when you get in."

/Rraowww. Can't wait./

"Then get back here quick."

/Quick as I can,/ he promises, hope riding his voice. Then his voice drops, becomes more sensual. /I missed you./

"Me too, you. But after you're here, and get your surprise, I can make it all up to you with dinner and some _special _dessert."

/Get some rest, I'm going to spend all night wearing you out./

xx

Darla spends the next two hours rearranging the house back the way it belongs and casting ever more frequent glances at the clock on the wall and the black windows. Finally bright lights cut across the living room wall and Darla is immediately ready to welcome her husband home.

When the front door opens, Bob Ventura carries a large box through the door, but he puts it down the moment he sees his wife. "Honey!"

"Welcome back, stranger," she greets him happily.

He recovers from his surprise quickly enough, probably presuming she's had enough rest and is ready for his plans. "Don't 'stranger' me. Commere!" Catching her wrist, he pulls her to him. His kiss is long, warm and thorough - and after a minute still shows no sign of breaking. His hands, however, are thoroughly renewing their acquaintance with her body.

"_Bob_!" she exclaims when she can pull away for air.

"Oh, no, winter's been too long." He holds her more securely, her body pressed to his and she's very aware of how happy he is to see her.

She shifts her own hips forward, returns the sentiment. But in time she has to breathe again.

"Don't you want dinner?" she gasps. His right hand slips down her back, into her pants and panties, pulls her closer, flesh on flesh.

"I've _got _dinner."

"Can't you _wait_?"

"I waited for two _months_." With his longer reach, he gets down much lower behind her, past her buttocks. His fingertips make her groan as he finds her moist flesh.

"Wait," she gasps. "You haven't had your surprise."

"What surprise?" His lips capture hers again, his hand delves even deeper behind her so he can start reaching his fingers up again. Her moisture helps his entry.

"In - the - bedroom," she mutters, gasping against his lips.

"Bedroom, here, who cares?"

She pushes back, but can only move her upper body, which gives his other hand access to her shirt while still holding her firmly deep into her from behind. "Bob, wait, will you?"

"Why?"

"Let me get the surprise." She pushes out of his grip, though disengaging is a devastating experience. "Wait here," she says, reaching to fix her disheveled panties, though already missing his touch. He'd felt so good...

"Why can't I _come _with you?" he leers.

"_Later_." She escapes his reach, no easy task, and retreats to the bedroom door. "Just wait there."

"All right." His anticipatory gleam is like an x-ray through her clothes. She turns and pushes the door open.

x

In the bedroom, she takes a moment to settle herself, not having anticipated how thoroughly the man would express his loneliness. Cheryl is asleep under the quilt and Darla wonders if she might have slept through what Bob had in mind if she hadn't gotten away.

She goes to the bed, reaches out to shake her sister awake.

x

His shirt off and pants open, wanting to be ready for the surprise to come, Ventura jumps when Darla's shriek slices through the house.

"_BOB_!"

Before the shrill cry can fade, Robert, clutching his open pants about his waist, dashes to the door and slides to a halt, astonished.

Darla's standing at the bed, but there's a woman lying upon it. Darla shakes the woman frantically and it takes a moment for him to recognize her. His heart seizes as he understands the significance of the grey face and disheveled hair. His wife looks up at him, her cry crams the room. "I CAN'T WAKE HER UP!"

x

As surprises go, this is almost too much, but with training ingrained by half a lifetime in the Navy, Ventura closes his belt and goes to his wife's aid. But when he gets close he sees the grey/blue skin isn't a trick of the dim light, the flaccid muscles aren't just relaxed in sleep and he touches the cool flesh and smells the utterly unmistakable odor so associated with tragedy.

He knows it's too late.

Darla continues to shake the still body, tries with increasingly frantic desperation to rouse the woman. Robert doesn't waste breath asking why his sister-in-law is in his bed. He can barely believe the situation, can barely say the toneless words.

"Cheryl's dead."

x

Darla falls to her knees with the cry of a soul torn in half and clings to the unresponsive body. Her wails and screams echo through the room as Robert stands beside the shattered women, trying to come to his own terms with what's happened.

A part of his mind tells him you're not supposed to touch or move the dead, the more practical part assures him that's no longer an issue. His hysterical wife has done far more than move her already. She clings to her, sobbing, and her wails reverberate through the room.

Unable to think of anything that could get through to Darla, Robert pulls his cell phone from his belt, opens it and presses 9-1-1.

Unable to hear anything clearly, he steps out of the room.

A minute later he returns, wishing he could leap from the hill rather than say: "Honey, I can't reach anyone."

She reacts just as he'd expected. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T REACH ANYONE?"

"I don't know. I can't get a signal."

"CAN'T GET A SIGNAL? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T GET A SIGNAL? CHER'S DEAD AND YOU CAN'T GET A SIGNAL?"

He tries again. "Honey, I don't know. I can drive into–"

"YOU'RE NOT GOING _ANYWHERE_! YOU CAN'T DRIVE THAT ROAD IN THE _DARK_! YOU'RE NOT LEAVING ME HERE ALONE!"

x

It takes fifteen minutes to work through hysteria, to get Darla to understand that if he can't call he must go to get help, that she must be strong until he can return with doctors, with someone, anyone. He already knew she wouldn't want him to go out on the road at night, so it takes even longer to win this part.

Finally, laden with promises of a rapid return, she allows him to go. They close the bedroom door, she waits in the living room, unable to think of what to do as he goes to his car.

The headlights withdraw along the wall behind her, reverse their earlier arc. They seem to take with them all the hope and joy they'd announced so short a time ago.

x

Darla Ventra, left alone in the house with her dead sister - _how can she be dead? -_ can barely think past the unreality. How can Bob think of navigating this road in the dark? She has kittens doing it in the daytime! How can Cheryl, so alive, so vital, be dead? She _can't _be!

Darla is on her feet, about to go back into the room, to prove them both wrong - Cheryl can't be dead - when she sees the phone on the counter. 'Bob used his cell phone. He _always _uses that cell phone. Did he even _try_–?'

She picks up the receiver - gets the tone - presses the buttons.

/9-1-1 operator, what is your emergency?/

xx

Thirty agonizing minutes later Darla watches the Sheriff's Deputy's car pull into the driveway. It arrives alone. 'What took them a half hour? Where's Bob?' She's through the front door, hurries down the incline to the white car. He's not inside, only two uniformed strangers. "Where's _Bob_?"

The driver's face is filled with the most horrendous sympathy. "Ma'am," he begins, "I'm sorry." He gets out of the car, his partner joins him from the other side.

"You're– you've got to help my–"

"Ma'am, I'm sorry, there's been an acciden–"

"Bob! My husband! He drove down the hill to get you. You had to pass him! Where _is _he?"

The two men exchange glances, the other Deputy says "I'm sorry, ma'am."

"What do you mean, you're 'sorry'? You haven't even _seen _her! Come on," she clutches his hand, "maybe you can help–"

"_Ma'am_!" The first officer's sharp tone breaks through to her. He softens his voice. "Ma'am, there was an accident. A car went off the road ... off the cliff..."

Darla Ventura stares at the man, the words seeming to come to her long after they'd been spoken and his sympathetic expression stops her heart. The night is silent save for the far away chirruping of crickets.

Darla's shriek slashes through the night.


	2. Overlook

Chapter Two  
Overlook

When Gibbs and DiNozzo enter their bullpen at 0700, they see Abby Sciuto putting a potted plant festooned with ribbons on Tim McGee's desk while Ziva David and Michelle Palmer, at their respective desks, look on with studied innocence. Gibbs slams to a halt, for the sight of McGee's normally sedate workplace isn't startling, it's shocking.

Banners, cards, bunting, signs, festive pictures, streamers and an eye-wrenching mélange of bright decorations have turned the absent agent's workplace into something exceeding a parade float. If Mardi Gras were besieged by the Tournament of Roses Parade and blended with something out of the psychedelic '60's, it might approach McGee's workplace.

"Abby," Gibbs calls sternly. The woman turns and regards him with the same innocence her presumed co-conspirators cultivate. No, strike that - Michelle might be a culprit, he doubts Ziva is.

"Hi, Gibbs! Good morning!" But then her cheerfulness vanishes as though scrubbed from her face and she looks back wistfully to the explosion of decorations, then to the bemused men. "Do you think he misses us?"

"Abby, it's been _three days._" If this is what she's accomplished since he left last night, Gibbs shudders to think what the station will look like after the fortnight.

"The man is on his _honeymoon_," Ziva reminds her with sharp bite, certain he does not miss anyone. "It is now a little after noon in Ireland. He is probably sitting down to lunch with his _wife_."

Considering the history each of them has with McGee, Ziva is not above twisting the knife.

"More likely they're still in bed," DiNozzo, beside Gibbs, speculates with a lascivious grin, "and Siobhan is _being _lunch."

Abby stalks up to him like the deadly advance of a battleship and plants her fists on her hips. "She's a _priest_, Tony."

"I'm just saying, all those sacrifi–" Abby's finger is a sword-thrust to the tip of his nose, her eyes are twin cannons, and Tony remembers Miranda's first right.

"You should decorate _her _office," Gibbs says firmly from beside her, wanting to avoid bloodshed - and more ribbons. The Chaplain's fourth floor office is both closed and enclosed.

"We did," Abby assures him. She glances back to the sharply gesturing woman behind herself before returning her bright smile to him. "Michelle and I got started the other evening."

Palmer had been urgently signaling to Abby not to include her in the conversation, and now she slumps down in her seat, defeated.

Gibbs doesn't attack, but instead heads for his desk. He can control what will be done to McGee's desk, wherever it is under that avalanche of decoration, but he doesn't want to picture what an unrestrained Abby Sciuto, with twelve days remaining, will do to _that _room. "Do her a favor, Abs: leave her enough room to open the door."

Abby pulls from the pocket of her white lab coat a small, rectangular flash drive. "I also downloaded everything there was on radio, TV, in print and on the web on the wedding, and believe me, there was a _lot _of it."

This isn't surprising; New York is the top celebrating city on the east coast, DC a distant second so the wedding had been one of the top news stories of the District on Saint Patrick's Day and Siobhan had dreaded the depth of coverage. On the first level, the wedding of a serving priest is a rare thing, but that of a woman priest, due to their numbers, is a much rarer thing still. Couple this with the groom being a Federal Agent who's also the author of now three Best Selling novels and the event was bound to attract attention.

Add to _that_ that the bride had been in the National news twice already; the first time last June when, under one excessively alliterative banner 'Combating Cleric Collars Criminal', she'd come to attention at the climax of the hunt for a serial murderer, and the second time was when, in January, she'd been kidnapped and tortured by that very same murderer, an escapee from FBI custody. The hunt had extended to several States and the collective total had made this wedding an occasion few reporters could pass up and seemingly none had.

x

"What are you going to do with all that footage?" DiNozzo asks as he heads to his desk, not neglecting to put some distance between himself and the mercurial woman.

"I don't know," Abby admits. "I'm thinking of turning it into a commemorative documentary, but I haven't made up my mind."

"Please do not," Ziva appeals.

"Ditto," Michelle interjects.

"Don't worry, Probette," DiNozzo advises the woman on the other side of the Mardi Gras float, "it still won't match the drama of your wedding."

"I hope it does." Last year's impromptu event at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial had been memorable enough without several passers-by having posted the footage on 'You Tube'. She's only grateful she'd been in Hawaii and far from interested in computers when those first images had aired.

They'll be there forever, but she's glad Siobhan and Tim's wedding garnered far more attention. Now if only she can rein in Abby.

x

Gibbs considers his ringing phone a relief. "Yeah, Gibbs."

The conversation is brief, the only word that ever applies to Gibbs and telephones. "Grab your gear," he orders as he hangs up and opens his desk drawer, switching his off-duty weapon for his Sig. "Navy Commander's dead sister-in-law in the hills near Webster Springs, Maryland, and police say _he _drove his car off a cliff."

xxx

Gibbs drives his car with Ziva beside him, the MCR truck following the too twisted road up the hill, Tony and Michelle following in the MCR truck and the black and white Medical Examiner truck bringing up the rear.

Gibbs has known worse roads and wonders which of the other drivers behind him made the trek with white knuckles.

If the initial report was accurate, Darla Ventura's fears could be realized if her husband drove off the long, treacherous broken back snake road. In an example of roadway maintenance and safety planning at its most outrageous, some portions of the guard rails along the five mile long trek up the hill are missing. He'd directed Ziva to examine closely the terrain of every vacant space they'd passed, but she'd reported nothing obvious.

Gibbs has had her call ahead to the troopers on site, but when they reach the portion of the road where the Commander is presumed to have met his unfortunate end, directions prove superfluous. The two Maryland State Trooper patrol cars, two Sheriff's Deputy's cars, three fire vehicles and an ambulance line the road single file at the base to head of a straight stretch of road.

When they take their places at the end of the line, at a sharp right turn marked by a vacant section of guard rail, the four agents and two MEs are treated to crisp, fresh air brutally marred by smoke and burnt out woodlands. The local LEOs have taken spaces on the uphill side of the vacant space, Gibbs and his people at the lower.

The end of the long downhill run is distinguished by no scoring of pavement as would be expected if someone had applied brakes before reaching the end and by thin and thready smoke wafting from below.

They walk to the open space to meet the knot of uniformed men and look down the steep cliff. Not much smoke rises and when they look down the reason is easily discerned.

Cancerous black mars the perfection of the natural vista, an obscene blister that distorts the lush landscape.

Nearly five hundred feet down the steep hill sparsely dotted with such burnt out trees and foliage as had established a foothold in the rocky, forbidding hillside. The ascending hill to their left is much more fertile and lush, the distinction in the two terrains sharp and disturbing. Clearly, when the winding hill had been excavated, it had prevented much of the rainwater and soil from reaching the lower elevations, hence the disparity.

There is, of course, an up-side to the distinction; if the hill were as lush below as above, the fire below that had burnt itself out for lack of fuel on the rocky terrain might yet burn for days. As it is, in the midst of an irregular black and smoldering expanse, lies what's left of a charred, apparently partially melted black hulk. It's impossible to tell the original color of the car which lies upon its passenger side some 500 feet below, black chassis and wheel frames facing them. They can discern no tires and not much else; from here they can see where some of the car's body has sagged, melted away into itself by the tremendous heat. The thin woods around the car are reduced to charred debris, smoldering skeletons of what had been an occasional tree and sparse shrubbery which is now piles of ash. The fire had been limited by surrounding rock before running out of fuel or it might well have taken the entire forest which has, fortunately, grown up several yards away from the base of the hill. Everything is visibly wet from the torrent of water that bathed it from above, and the ground surrounding the vehicle's corpse is muddy black.

Three men, distinguishable only by their uniforms, two state and one local police, examine the scene around the overturned vehicle. There are also two Troopers and one Deputy at the unbarriered turn.

x

"Got it out about twenty-five minutes ago," Trooper Tate tells them after introductions have been made. "Burned for about three hours, give or take, there wasn't actually much left for the pumpers to put out."

"Is there a body inside?"

The man nods. "Not much of one, but it's there."

"What happened to the guard rail?" The space before them, at the end of a long stretch of road downhill and culminating in a sharp right turn, leaves neither protection nor indication the driver had attempted to stop or swerve from his fate.

"Gone," Deputy Mallick replies.

"Gone, Deputy?"

"Hang gliders," Tate tells them.

"Come again?"

"We've had problems with hang gliders. They don't like the rails getting in the way of their jumps."

"We've whipped the local club into shape," Deputy Mallick interjects, clearly displeased with Tate's implication that the Sheriff's office isn't keeping up with its end of enforcement "but visitors seem to always be a step ahead of county maintenance.

"A sportsman can get a long running start off the cliff if he's willing to put countless lives in danger for his own entertainment."

"They're a menace." Trooper Prestley doesn't hide his disgusted anger. "They think they're too far to be caught, and a lot of times they are. We've caught several, mostly by knowing the optimum time to spring the trap, but too often they get away with it."

"The upshot," Tate concludes the outrageous report, "is that Mr. Ventura, heading into town to get help for his sister-in-law, probably had no clue he was heading for the turn until he went off the cliff."

x

Gibbs isn't concerned about hang gliders. They'll be tracked down in time but the deed is done and he wants a look into what's left of that car lying in the charred black mud. He looks to his team, annoyed to see that Michelle Palmer wearing high-heeled shoes, but he holds his tongue when he sees Ziva's low shoes are little better. He'd said there'd be a cliff involved. The women can stay up here and gather statements. "Come on, DiNozzo."

"Oaa, gee, boss, are you sure I can't stay up here? I'm not exactly dressed for climbing." He looks down at his shoes.

Gibbs sees that the brown leather is probably imported and costs half a week's salary. He's ready to give his first triple-wake-up.

"Rule 16," he says instead and starts down the steep slope.

DiNozzo bites back an answer, receiving a quasi-sympathetic look from Trooper Prestley. He doesn't protest further, knowing Gibbs' reply, if he's compelled to make one, will be considerably less kind. Rule 16, one of a series the senior agent has devised as a means of training his charges, can be condensed into a single word.

'Anticipate.'

x

DiNozzo picks his way carefully down the steep incline, moving cautiously from grips on one tree to reach out for, and occasionally fall into, grips with the next. He tries to make speed, but is aggravated to see Gibbs rapidly outdistance him, all without using any handholds. The supervisor's shoes are more sensible for mountain climbing - or descending - than his own and, by keeping his body turned to the side and over-sidestepping, Gibbs makes insane progress and makes it look too damn easy.

As DiNozzo gingerly lowers himself from tree to tree, almost falling from one to another beside the path the overturning car has cleared, he considers trying to imitate the man's moves. A moment later he's clinging tightly to a sapling, realizing that imitation is the most certain way of breaking his neck.

He looks down. It has taken the Supervisor less than a minute to reach the overturned car; he's looking back up and DiNozzo knows from the expression on his impatient boss' face that he will soon pay for this delay in reaching the scene.

'Maybe a broken neck isn't such a bad thing.'

He increases his pace to beyond suicidal.


	3. Rule 30

Chapter Three  
Rule 30

Two Troopers and a Sheriff's Deputy have already made the descent down the hill and they examine the blackened, smoldering area surrounding the overturned car. Everything within a hundred foot diameter is gone, little more than dripping black shards water soaked from the top of the hill into a quagmire of black mud and worse. The blackened vehicle, much of it melted away, lies on the passenger's side. Gibbs, not touching the car beyond holding his hand an inch away from the still-warm metal, looks in through the shattered windshield.

It appears heat may have contributed to the glass' demolition; he'll let Abby tell him for certain. Certainly much of what's left of the window frame is not sharp.

The driver and passenger air bags have both deployed, the compartments are empty but the bags themselves have been obliterated. Abby will have to tell him which tiny black fragments are the bags.

Gibbs hears the sound of skidding leather. "Nice of you to _join _us, DiNozzo."

"Sorry boss," the breathless answer comes. "It's a bit harder than it looks."

As soon as Gibbs looks back at him, DiNozzo knows he's said too much. "He had a lot harder time," he amends and decides he's been lucky. He looks into the burned-out wreck and focuses on his work.

The driver air bag had probably held the body in place through the crash but possibly didn't do Ventura much of a favor afterwards. The alternatives being death in the crash, possibly immediate, and the lingering death by incineration, DiNozzo believes he'll take the former.

The chassis is mangled, crumpled at both ends. There are no windows, nor more than hints of fused, melted glass in the rear. It's impossible to tell, until they search the hillside, how much glass had been shattered and left behind and how much had sloughed away in rivulets. Upholstery didn't survive, little else is even half intact, and only crumpled and half-melted steel remains to indicate this used to be a car. No one is willing to venture a guess at this moment as to what type or color car it had been.

Gibbs leans in, not touching the overturned car, peering in through the broken windshield.

The interior of the cabin is a charred, black mess. Laying on its side, the car has tilted everything into an unintelligible stack against the passenger doors, but these doors are blocked. It's only by imagination that some things can be identified, yet the passenger and rear area are packed solid with burnt-out lumber. The body, a crisped, blackened hulk laying on its right side upon the wood pile, had been overcooked as though upon a bonfire. If it had been belted in, there is little left to support that contention. The metal pieces of the belt are there, the straps can't be distinguished yet from the remaining charred debris. Gibbs can't find the corpse's right arm.

Hairless and blackened, the still smoldering corpse's mouth is open, and the men can't block his scream from their imaginations.

The body is shrunken, heat having convulsed the muscles, bending the single remaining arm inward, half the left forearm missing. Both legs are gone, consumed by the inferno, one leg below the knee, the other to mid-thigh.

The agents hear the sounds of new arrivals and look back to see Ducky arrive a few seconds before his taller assistant. The older man peers in through the shattered windshield at the cadaver. "A singularly unpleasant way to expire."

"Will you be able to work out a Cause?" There's not a lot left of the body so Gibbs doesn't have high hopes. He does hope it's the injuries from the rolling crash that killed Ventura, or at least left him unconscious. If the Commander couldn't escape the horrific blaze that'd reduced much of the surrounding woods to ashes, he hopes the man had been spared knowing what was happening to him.

"I shall have to let you know. There are several ways to determine Cause of Death in a fire, such as soot in the lungs, but first glances are uninformative."

"Get what you can, we can't stay long. One more body to check."

xx

Of course, 'long' is relative. He leaves Ziva in charge of the site to supervise the investigation and the transporting of what's left of this vehicle and its unfortunate driver to NCIS Headquarters. There is much evidence to secure before the burnt-out wreck can be hauled up the long hill and trucked back to Washington, so he's directed DiNozzo to send for the appropriate vehicle.

There's another reason why he leaves Ziva here but takes Michelle with him. Ziva is more experienced in Crime Scene Investigation so her skills best serve here but she has also proven herself no more adept in dealing with crying women than he is. If the charred body is indeed that of Commander Ventura, when that has been definitely confirmed, the woman who lost her sister to death must deal with double tragedy.

x

By the time the agents and examiners follow the State Troopers up the hill to arrive at the blue and white bungalow sitting on level ground carved into the hillside it's nearly eleven o'clock. The bright sun glares through the cloudless sky and shines almost directly downward onto the bungalow. The odor of burnt woodland and half-melted car has seeped into their vehicles and clothing, but they're grateful to get it out of their lungs, replacing the stink with the fresh country air on the hillside. However, they'll have to carry the fire with them on their clothes into the house, and it's going to give the widow an unavoidable scent of her husband's fate.

A car sits in the driveway which is cordoned off by yellow 'Crime Scene' tape, while parked on the road, tilted onto the slanted lawn to leave room for passing cars, is a white Sheriff's car and before it another Trooper vehicle. Gibbs must park in front of that, also partially on the slanted lawn, and this leaves the ME truck to perch before them at a precarious angle. "What do you think Ducky will say," DiNozzo asks, "if we come back out and the truck's tilted over?"

Michelle, glancing back at him from the front seat, says nothing but her expression is meaningful enough.

Gibbs leads them up to the door, certain Ducky will be delayed making certain that Jimmy corrects this mistake.

x

When they enter and follow Troopers Prestley and Tate, who escorted them so they may also make discreet reports to their Lieutenant, they are also introduced to Sheriff Jung and Deputy Kingston. The emotional center of the living room is the brown haired woman huddled on the couch within a red blanket.

Jung is a stocky man holding a good 30 pounds more than his State counterpart but it's apparent who carries the most weight here. It takes a moment for Lieutenant Fajardo's terse summary to bring everyone up to date. Sheriff Jung stands silent, a harsh center of anger and it's clear he doesn't want to yield primacy to the Maryland State Officer who has taken over verbal control of the moment, but Gibbs doesn't care whose jurisdiction extends how far. He cares about answers, regardless of who gives them to him.

Ducky and Jimmy, the truck more properly secured half-blocking the road, pause within the doorway, neither wanting to be perceived as ignoring the grieving widow and not knowing yet where the second body is.

When the woman perceives there are new people in the room, she throws the red blanket off, leaps from the couch and cuts across the room to Gibbs. "_Did you find him_?"

Gibbs knows Darla Ventura has already been informed of her late husband's condition, but until he knows how much detail she's been given he'll be discreet. "We've seen him."

Whatever restraint she'd been holding breaks - very likely again - into shattered wailing. Gibbs is glad she doesn't try to embrace him; with the exception of Abby Sciuto, he wants to keep very much out of practice in consoling women.

x

"Cheryl Keitt is in the bedroom," Sheriff Jung says over the woman's sobbing, indicating the alcove directly in from the front door, open bathroom straight ahead, apparently the bedroom is beyond the living room and they will see later what the third door opens to on the left. The Field Agents enter the right room before the Examiners, the four leaving Gibbs to glean what information he can from the wailing woman.

While DiNozzo stays close to the door to take notes, Michelle examines the bedroom. Ducky and Jimmy, burdened with gurney and a mass of evidence and other bags, must wait until the agents are finished documenting the details of the bedroom, so they stand off between living room and kitchen and wait with their equipment-laden gurney, listening for clues in the conversation beside them when it can begin.

x

"How long has your husband been gone?" Gibbs asks when the woman, now seated again on the couch backed to the wall shared with the bedroom, can stop crying. He sees in her expression how fragile she still is.

"Ten last night, about," she says, wringing a white handkerchief in her hands. "I'm not sure when. I guess ten."

"Tell me about last evening."

The story is brief. The agents learn how Darla Ventura and her sister Cheryl Keitt had come from New York to the Maryland hill, to the summer home Robert Ventura had spent the winter renovating, how she'd invited her sister to spend the weekend, how Keitt had gone to bed to take a nap after the long drive and had never woken up.

If Gibbs is to believe this version of events, Darla Ventura has just painted herself as the only one in the house when Cheryl Keitt died, and as the last one to see Ventura before he drove off the cliff. Now, if she was alone outside the bedroom while he was checking on the body...

Too soon to be too sure. Rule 37: 'Examine the pieces, assemble them, then look at the entire picture.'

x

"Was your husband surprised you'd brought your sister?" Gibbs asks. Her tone had implied as much.

"Yes, but when he came in he was more concerned about seeing me," she says, uncomfortable enough that she can't meet his eyes. "It's been over two months ... and he wanted to ... well ..."

"So is that your car out front?" he asks to distract her from her embarrassment.

"It's Cher's. I left mine in New York. I didn't see the point in having both cars up here. Cher was only staying for the weekend."

DiNozzo looks up from his PDA with a frown. "Didn't your husband notice it was your sister's car in the driveway instead of yours?"

"I don't think he pays attention to things like that."

Gibbs and DiNozzo exchange looks, but say nothing. Gibbs would speak about a Navy Commander's observation skills, DiNozzo on the man's interest in a reunion with his wife after a cold winter.

"Excuse me," Gibbs says. His team can make their observations and alert him to anything important. Ducky and Palmer entered the bedroom a few moments before and he wants to see what they've learned about the body.

xx

By the time Gibbs has disentangled himself from the woman, Michelle Palmer has taken the necessary pictures and allowed her husband - and his boss - to reach the body.

Cheryl Keitt, clad in bra and panties and, if the discoloration of death is ignored, looking somewhat like her live sister, lies on the disheveled bed. Her position and that of the bed sheets and comforter, makes it obvious that her body had been moved, a fact the senior Examiner discourses on in quiet though sulfurous terms.

"Can't do much," Gibbs says philosophically. He knows he has to take the scene as he finds it, not how he wishes the woman, undoubtedly distraught, had left it. "What can you tell me?"

"Well, not much," Ducky confesses, pushing his annoyance into a box and mentally tossing it off the cliff outside. The brunette's body shows no notable damage besides the deplorable rumpling. "There is no blood spatter, no obvious signs of trauma, no bruising, contusions or much of anything else I can see at the moment. If she hadn't been disturbed I could discern something of distress from the position of the body or of the bedding, but at the moment I cannot even say definitively if she was face up, down or laying on her side."

"Darla Ventura was upset about the death."

"Yes." Consideration of this does cool Ducky's ire. "One death is tragic, two within a span of less than an hour is too distressing to contemplate. A horrible coincidence."

"Rule 30."

"Ah, yes."

Jimmy Palmer looks up from where he crouches beside the body, his eyes asking the question. Rather than elaborating, Gibbs nods to the man's wife, taking pictures from the other side of the bed.

"'The more something looks like a coincidence," she tells him, "the less it is'."


	4. Sheep

Chapter Four  
Sheep

Gibbs and his team, sans the honeymooning McGee, have gone with Ducky and Jimmy to the Maryland hills to investigate the incineration of Commander Robert Ventura following the unexpected and thus-far-unexplained death of his sister-in-law. An apparent auto accident has claimed Ventura's life in a fiery crash as he'd been driving down a twisting, night-blackened road into the town at the bottom of the hill.

The sun had seemed barely up as they'd examined the site of the Commander's death, just clearing the top of the hill above them, the grass still flecked with dew. They'd gotten the call in the first few moments of their shift, and with a double investigation to conduct, breakfast may well be superseded by lunch.

The agents, having examined Ventura's charred remains at the burnt out center of a ravine, have proceeded to his residence higher up the hill, and by the time they'd reached the blue and white house set into the hillside it was true morning, the sun shining brightly upon what promises to be a dismal day. There they've met with the distraught wife, now widow, who now grieves for both her husband and sister.

Gibbs has disengaged himself from the near-hysterical woman to confer with Ducky and their Palmers while investigating the bedroom. "She thinks this one died in her sleep," Gibbs relays to Ducky as they inspect Cheryl Keitt's body upon the rumpled bed.

"It's possible, of course," Ducky admits, not liking to. He's only been with the woman's corpse for a few minutes, not long enough for even a reasonable speculation on Cause of Death in the absence of wounds or trauma. "I shall have to examine her when we get her back before I can make even a preliminary estimate."

The woman's body is in nearly full rigor, a process that begins at the extremities after some twelve hours and progresses to the torso. She had been left in the position she'd reached when the distraught Darla Ventura had released her after frantic efforts to awaken the supposedly unconscious woman. If the report provided by the Maryland State Troopers and Sheriff in the living room are accurate, Keitt had already been dead when she'd been found. Lividity has settled the blood in the back of her body, save for a voided, whitened area where the body rested upon the mattress. The bloodless front of her underwear-clad body is fixed in the pallor of death.

All the oxygen in her body had been absorbed by cells which, unreplenished, had also died. The pervasive odor of death hangs heavy in the room.

The bed and everything on it will have to go to Abby but there is no way to determine the position of the body at death. Darla's efforts to awaken her sister, supposedly dead then but now with no way now to be certain, have removed any hope of making that determination. The investigators could be angry at that, there's little point now.

"No gross indication of wounds or needle marks, but I will have to examine her more thoroughly. No visible, apparent bruising though again I may find some, latent or possibly subdural. No ligature marks. There is little point in using a liver probe to determine time of death, you already have a more accurate range than I can provide." Ducky examines the woman's partially still stiff body as well as he might. Rigor is increasing from the extremities inward but it will still be some time before the body is completely engulfed.

Keitt had been estimated to have died between five and eight last night. It's too long to get a reliable range, let alone an accurate account of everything that had been done before, during and after her death. They must rely upon a single witness testimony.

"Come, Mr. Palmer, let's get the young lady secured and then you and _your _young lady will set about securing the evidence for transport while I speak to Mrs. Ventura."

xx

"Did your sister have any medical problems you are aware of?" Ducky asks as he sits down upon the couch next to the woman, Gibbs standing nearby. As an Officer of the Court, Ducky will have no problems in obtaining the deceased woman's medical history, but any clues he can get before doing so are welcome.

"She ... she ... has ... had ..."

"Take your time," he advises kindly, recognizing the woman's fragile control. Still half-distraught, there's too much chance the woman will lose vital information in the retelling. She must, after all, deal with the sudden deaths of both her sister and husband. "Would you like some water?" he asks with a glance to Gibbs. The man crosses to the kitchen even before she nods.

By the door both Sheriff Jung and Maryland Trooper Lieutenant Fajardo wait and watch, not close to one another at all. Neither man likes that his jurisdiction has been trumped by the 'Feds', even after Fajardo had 'trumped' Jung and they like it less that Gibbs hadn't even pretended there was any uncertainty - or that he cares. He'd just assumed charge and put both officials, without so much as a thought about their rivalry or primacy, into the back seat.

When Gibbs returns and hands the woman a glass, she drains it before she can answer Ducky.

"Cher has asthma. I don't know how bad, it doesn't seem to really bother her."

'How accurate is that?' he wonders, filing the information for future referral. "Do you see one another often?"

She shakes her head. "Cher's in New York, Brooklyn. We're in Willow Grove."

The Pennsylvania Air Station is a Joint Reserve Base for Marine, Army, Air Force and National Guard personnel, and her conclusion about the asthma's present severity cannot, therefore, be accurate or comprehensive. "What does she use for her asthma? Does she use an inhaler?"

Darla shakes her head. "I don't think so ... I've never seen ..." She nearly breaks again.

"It's all right," Ducky says, patting her shoulder comfortingly. "Take all the time you need."

No answer comes.

"When you found your sister was dead," Gibbs asks the woman, annoying Ducky with his obvious intent not to take time, "what did you do?"

Some day Ducky would like to conduct an interview.

Darla looks up at Gibbs blankly, having already answered some of that question. "Did you call for help?" he elaborates.

"We tried to. Bob couldn't get an answer on his cell. He said he had to drive into town, get help."

"So he didn't get the message out? How did the ambulance get notified?"

"No, I called." She looks toward to the phone on the wall by the front door, between the living room and kitchen.

"That phone worked?"

"I don't know," she answers his tone rather than the question. "I was too upset. I don't know if he even thought of it. Bob's married to his cell phone."

The thought of her husband, dead so soon after her sister, shatters her. This is an unendurable early morning, the coming day will be worse.

xxx

Mrs. Siobhan McGee stands on the top of the emerald hill bathed in the warm, mid-afternoon sunlight, looking over miles of interlinking farmland. The patchwork properties that reach for the horizon are separated by light grey lines of hip-high stone walls and distinguished by varying shades of green.

She particularly relishes the sight, _any _unaided sight, since Lasik treatments have freed her of a nearly lifelong burden. After more years than she cares to count, she has the pleasure of enjoying this rustic view, not through small panes of glass, but with her unobstructed eyes.

Far behind her is the first of the three almost isolated, quaint and antiquated Bad-and-Breakfasts, so selected among many for just those reasons, where she and Timmy are enjoying their honeymoon, this one in County Wicklow. After they'd finished a late lunch, she decided to come out to get some air, feeling there is no better air on the planet. While Washington is coming out of winter, Ireland is enjoying a mid-March warm spell, the prelude to a steady ascent into summer.

On the first day of their honeymoon they didn't set foot out of the cottage, spending their day in newly wedded bliss. Now Siobhan has both the time and inclination to take in some of the lush countryside.

If it were possible she'd walk to their next destinations, all the way to Sligo and thence to Cork, but it'd seemingly take forever to make it back to Washington.

She wouldn't mind.

x

The soft breeze flutters her flame red hair, ruffles her skirt about her bare legs. Removing her sandals, she drops them beside her, enjoying the feel of the grass on her bare feet. Gathering her hair back, she secures it under a white band and magically her husband stands behind her. She looks back over her shoulder. "Tráthnóna maith, a ghrá mo chroi," she whispers softly, not wanting to break the mood, her words only for him.

To Tim's ears she makes Gaelic, even 'good afternoon', sound so romantic and she's always trying to teach him, with the stated intent that they can then have private conversations even when not alone, but this isn't a lesson. "My heart's beloved?" he asks aloud.

"Forever," she smiles lovingly, kissing him. He turns her about and they enjoy a far longer, more thorough kiss. But then she turns back toward the green vista, leans back into him, cuddles against him with his arms about her. "Look at it," she breathes in wonder. "Have you ever seen a sky so blue, a sun so bright, tiny clouds so white?"

"They're that way because of you," Tim says into her ear, his voice a gentle caress. They stand quietly, she leaning back into his body, enjoying a moment to drink in beauty. Tim has noted that three days back in their native land – okay, her native, his ancestral – have sharpened her brogue to such a degree that it's as though she'd never left.

To him, the beauty of the countryside before them pales in comparison to his wife.

"Flatterer," she chides, looking back and up at him, receiving a kiss she feels down to her bare toes. "Look out there," she directs his gaze to the patchwork miles. "There's no ocean, no Navy, Marines or military base. I've left my collar back in the office desk drawer." She closes her hands over his low on her stomach, petting the backs of his hands. "I don't have to do anything in a church unless I want to. I can walk in and say 'oooohhh, how _pretty_' and just kneel down and enjoy it - and thank God for my husband."

x

He's flattered too, and her plans do sound wonderful. It's a treat to get away from their lives; their badges are in their luggage and they don't even have any jurisdiction to bother them. "So!" he says, catching her hands between his. "What do you want to do today?"

She looks out into the expanse of green. Far away toward their right, the ancient town rests nestled in God's hand. She can barely distinguish the individual buildings, but can easily spot the pale grey, high steeple of a church. It's in the center of the village and towers over it, reaching upward in prayer and promise. She wonders if Timmy views it the same way.

But her eyes are drawn again to the fields that spread wide before and around them, shades of green marking properties and interlocking through the countryside. One of the distant fields slightly right is dotted by small clouds of grazing sheep.

"I want to walk straight through these fields to the town, though it'll take an hour. I want to walk through the town and see everything as it was before we were born. I want to go for dinner into a pub whose music calls to me so I can say over it to everyone 'I'm here with my _husband_'. I want to walk barefoot through those fields and have you grab me and throw me down and we make wild, mad, passionate love until my screams panic that flock of sheep."

Still holding her hand, he steps around her and takes a step toward the distant town. She lets go, bends and retrieves her sandals but she doesn't follow. He looks back and she confesses, "But I'm being selfish. What do _you _want to do today?"

He smiles. "I want to scare some sheep."

xxx

Five hours back on the clock, in the late morning on the Maryland hillside, Gibbs fights to keep his impatience under control. He's never been at his best with crying women; he'd prefer to face terrorists or serial murderers across an interrogation table or on the field of battle, guns blazing and death the price of failure. Simply putting together who was where last night at what time is proving to be more of a challenge than it ought to.

One thing he _has_ established is that, almost from the moment of her arrival, Darla Ventura had begun moving furniture and other items, and she moved the body in her distress and grief, something Ducky has already expounded at length about.

Further, and more ominously, he isn't sure he's not facing a serial murderer. By her own words, Darla Ventura was the only one in the house when Cheryl Keitt died, and was the last - and only - one to see Robert Ventura before his deadly plunge off the cliff. He's anxious to hear Abby's evaluation of the condition of that car, because she should be able to tell him how Ventura had taken that plunge.

He glances up to see Tony and Michelle leave the bedroom again, Michelle with the camera. Tony hefts the black forensic case as they continue to the door, and Gibbs signals to Lt. Fajardo and Sheriff Jung to follow.

Outside, Michelle turns left and proceeds to and around the corner of the house, Gibbs and the other two men follow DiNozzo right toward the cordoned parking area. He bends under the yellow tape, the others watch from outside the perimeter. Tony crouches down and sets the box a few inches away from a large irregular dried stain that mars the paved surface three feet closer to them than Cheryl Keitt's car.

"The only window in the bedroom is closed but not locked," DiNozzo reports as he opens the case and gathers supplies. "The Probette took shots and I sent her to shoot outside; we'll dust for more prints when Ducky's done."

Wearing latex gloves, he takes a long swab with attached plastic cover, extends the cotton from the plastic, reverse rolls it over the dried stain, withdraws the rod, closes the plastic top over the cotton and seals the implement in a clear bag, then logs the information on the printed lines.

"We got a sample too," Lt. Fajardo tells them. "We'll have our lab analyze it, but I can tell you it smells like brake fluid."

Gibbs reads in Sheriff Jung's eyes that his own people also have their samples. Territorial wars are so much fun.

"Looks to be a few hours old," DiNozzo says, straightening and coming out of the secured zone. "It doesn't look to have settled into the blacktop, just on it, but after we get some shots I'll chisel off a section."

xx

Gibbs wants to see what's visible around the corner of the house, and the men find Michelle waiting for them. The three foot wide skirt of decorative white gravel extends along three sides of the building, they can see it ends flush with the rear wall, doesn't extend beyond that point to meet a rear skirt.

"What've you got?"

The petite woman points to the gravel under the window. "I can't say if anyone did or didn't stand there and open the window, but I got shots from multiple angles."

"Maybe Abby can do one of her vector analysis thingies," DiNozzo says.

Gibbs ignores him, instead asking Michelle "Did you get prints inside?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do here now."

"Yes, sir."

Gibbs' first thought is to search the grass for any indication anyone had walked upon it recently.

"Kind of paints a picture," DiNozzo says as the four men carefully inspect quarters of the lawn, the steady wind making certainty very difficult, "two pictures, actually, like a stereopticon. You remember stereopticons, don't you boss?" When he looks up, Gibbs' look isn't deadly, though it could become so. "Well, maybe Ducky."

They'd divided the length of the house into quarters, each man taking a section and walking up an back in one foot wide strips. "Well, anyway, picture one, left side: unknown perp breaks in, offs who he thinks is Mrs. Ventura; they're kind of alike as sisters and Keitt wasn't supposed to be here, then he cuts the brake line, the Commander takes a header off the cliff. Two, right side: perp does know he offed the sister, kills Commander Ventura but help comes before he can get back in and finish the job. Or three: Darla kills Cheryl, then while the Commander's examining her, she comes out and cuts the line." No one says anything. "Whatdaya think?"

"Stereopticon?"

"All right, so I'm not into 3D."

"Motive." Gibbs turns to Fajardo and Jung, inspecting their own sections. "Anyone have a problem with Ventura?"

"No one I know of," Jung answers. Fajardo doesn't even try, the victim's a stranger to the State Trooper. "I'll look into that, let you know what I find."

"Well, DiNozzo, I'm still waiting for motive."

"So am I." When he looks toward his silent boss in his quarter of the side lawn, Gibbs is standing straight staring at him. "Cheryl Keitt was wearing bra and panties, but it doesn't look sexual. Darla Ventura didn't indicate she heard anything and the rumpling of the bed looks like it could come from Ventura's trying to wake her."

Gibbs doesn't consider this conclusive. He's known of rapes where a person in the next room had no clue.

"It's not a drifter," Jung speculates.

"No," Gibbs agrees, giving the conclusion at least a reasonable probability, "someone passing through tends to stay on the level, not climb a hill."

But his is still by no means conclusive.

xx

The search moves to the front yard, Gibbs pairing with Fajardo and DiNozzo with Jung to inspect left and right grids with no results even as Michelle finishes and reenters the house. Eventually the men follow.

"We'd like to move you close to NCIS headquarters at the Navy Yard," Gibbs tells Darla Ventura when they return to the living room. "We have a secure place we use to house witnesses to crimes under investigation." Ventura seems not to hear him, she's staring at Jimmy Palmer as he wheels the gurney containing Cheryl Keitt's body from the house.

She turns, belatedly hearing him. "What? I can't! Why can't I stay here?"

Gibbs has had this conversation hundreds of times, and his answers have grown progressively shorter. "Crime Scene." And this time she won't get the chance to rearrange it again.

"But–"

"Mrs. Ventura," Michelle says, capturing her attention with her gentler tone and Gibbs figuratively withdraws. Palmer II's young enough to spend more time on the explanation.

She's also seen in her boss' eyes the same thoughts she's had: get this woman out of here before there's no longer a viable crime scene. "We'll have Agents and Forensics Teams here to try to determine why your sister and husband died. Both for your safety and to preserve evidence until it's analyzed, we have to secure the house."

"Wait - _my _safety? I'm the one who's _alive_."

They're very interested in the 'why' of that. "We can't rule out the possibility that someone, well, that someone was involved in these deaths. Until we know they were accidents or coincidences -" she mentally winces as Rule 30 flashes through her mind, "we have to treat them as though they were not."

"We'll have an agent stay with you," Gibbs says. "While we set it up, you should pack."

The agent he selects will have one priority: watch the woman and try to determine if she's a double-murderer.

Ventura looks up at him, apparently more afraid than earlier. "I haven't even unpacked."

xx

When the woman finally goes into the bedroom to collect her luggage under DiNozzo's supervision, Gibbs turns to Michelle.

"You get any prints off the window?"

"I've gotten better," she says disgustedly, "they're very bad but maybe Abby can find _some_thing."

"Where's the inventory?" He'd instructed her earlier to prepare a list of the items they'll bring back to Washington, where everything will be turned over to Abby and Ducky to perform their respective divinations.

"Right here, sir." She hands him the paper.

He looks it over and hands it back. "Sister dies mysteriously; husband drives off a cliff, there may or not be an intruder. What does this say to you?"

"Rule 3." He frowns down into her eyes, unable to see how Rule 3 could apply to this. "_My _Rule 3: 'When it looks like you'll have an easy day, pack a toothbrush'."

xxx

Back at the crash site Ziva meets Gibbs and DiNozzo at the MCR truck. The ME truck pulls in behind them and Gibbs stops his car behind it. Gibbs will have DiNozzo take his car to drive Ventura to an NCIS Safe House near the Navy Yard and remain with her while he continues with Michelle back to Headquarters in the truck. In time, DiNozzo will hand Ventura off to Marie Watson and return to Headquarters.

"There were no skid marks," Ziva reports as they watch a tow truck very slowly winch the incinerated vehicle up the hill. A quick glance is enough to show how much more time it'll take. She'd inspected the straight road to the open guard rail thoroughly before making the definitive statement. "It appears he never slowed down in taking the corner. The first collision with the embankment took place 73 feet from the cliff edge. The car rolled, apparently end over end, and came to rest 428 feet down." She hands Gibbs the camera's memory card.

"When will they be ready?"

"The Sergeant estimates at least another quarter hour for the tow. They must proceed cautiously to preserve evidence. Then they must get it on a flat bed."

He doesn't bother to correct her. "Keep charge of it, get back when you can. Ducky and Palmer will stay with you to collect the body."

xxx

Gibbs takes Ziva's call from the Maryland hillside over an hour later. Difficulties with getting Ventura's shattered vehicle on the flatbed truck without losing evidence continue to delay her but Ducky and Jimmy are long since gone.

"Just get in as soon as you can," Gibbs directs and hangs up the phone. It's DiNozzo's day on the lunch call, he's already returned and the three agents have eaten before resuming their respective investigations.

The histories of Darla Ventura and Cheryl Keitt are unremarkable or else Palmer or DiNozzo would've called out the discrepancy, but neither has interrupted Gibbs' research into Robert Ventura's history.

"It's the wife," DiNozzo's unsurprising pronouncement breaks Gibbs' concentration.

"You don't say, DiNozzo," he says sharply, "Took you all this time to work out that the only one left had to be the one?"

"Well, no, I was actually trying to avoid it."

Since this contradicts his usual conclusions it surprises Michelle into asking "Why?"

"Breaks Rule 31."

Michelle turns to Gibbs, coloring slightly and wondering what inversion has spawned when she hadn't been looking. "I'm sorry, I don't remember that one."

"'The only one who could've done it probably didn't'. Get a warrant for their records; bank, telephone, all the usual." He knows she has templates prepared for 'the usual', allowing her to expedite them. He's never been above having his team pull the records without them, and thus he's ordered the searches already, but it's good to have warrants in the records when they eventually go to trial, and no one ever checks the times anyway. He turns to DiNozzo. "I'm going to look into her now, check as though she didn't do it. You take over Ventura's Service Record." Such fresh changes of perspective are common and frequently profitable.

"You mean 'once you've eliminated the impossible'?"

"Clock's ticking, people," Gibbs' tone slashes through them. "Palmer, you're with me."

"Yes, sir." She hurriedly saves the affidavit file, knowing Gibbs will leave her behind to catch the elevator later, then to search for him, if she isn't fast enough.


	5. Crack the Whip

Chapter Five  
Crack the whip.

Donald Mallard glances up from the nude body of Cheryl Keitt upon the table to his Assistant, seeing him through the clear Plexiglas shields that cover each of their faces. "Speaking of your Final Exams," he grants a wry smile, as they hadn't been speaking of any such thing, "how are your studies progressing?" The last tests for the young man's M.D. certification are a few weeks off.

Jimmy shakes his head, half-despondent. "I'm not ready," he answers, his voice distorted even to his own ears by the Plexiglas shield that protects his face.

"Indeed?" Ducky's surprised but not unduly concerned at the pessimistic tone. Jimmy has been quite competent throughout the years they've worked together, and in addition to formal studies he's made certain the young man has been very thoroughly tutored – on a vast number of medical subjects.

"'Chelle was quizzing me last night."

"Always a useful method."

"The subject was cerebral injuries. I answered Subhemal Duratoma."

Ducky chuckles. "I'm confident you'll get it right in the actual exam."

"I hope so."

"So tell me, what was your lady's response to that minor flub?"

Jimmy puts his hand to the back of his head. "She's been hanging around Agent Gibbs too long."

Ducky chuckles again and has to grant the power of irony as he hears the doors part. Only one person walks in and right up to them while seeing they're busy.

x

"What do you have, Duck?" Gibbs asks.

"You're relatively early," Ducky answers, not glancing back or up from the body before him. He hasn't yet made even the first incision. "We've completed the External Exam and have not yet begun our Exploration." Jimmy, unable to wave, greets his wife with a grin that his mentor doesn't notice.

"Thought you'd be working on Ventura," Gibbs says. He's the Naval officer.

"I considered it, but with two deaths in equally mysterious circumstances, it was an even toss. Mr. Palmer, on the other hand, preferred to work on our rather attractive young lady. It seems that nude women have lately become Mr. Palmer's forté."

"Um, doctor, I - you–"

Ducky looks up with a smile. "Yes, my boy?" He'd been teasing, Jimmy had played no part in his choice, but the young man's distress is considerably higher than it should be for harmless banter. He's also looking past rather than at him. Ducky looks back over his shoulder and then raises the clear shield. "Oh. I'm terribly sorry, my dear. That wasn't–"

"It's all right, Doctor Mallard," Michelle says. "Ever since 'Deep Six' outed him, I've known Jimmy's into women's corpses."

Jimmy throws the shield upward. "'_CHELLE_!"

The only thing worse than being outrageously teased is being laughed at.

x

"I'm sorry, honey," Michelle says soothingly when she can stop laughing. She at least has the grace to stop first.

Jimmy's glad for the moment that the table's between him and the three. "Doctor Mallard's my boss," he tells her with tight lips, "but _you _are going to be punished tonight."

"Only please use the _red_ cat-o-nine-tails. That black whip raises the worst welts, especially on my breasts."

"'_CHELLE_!" He turns to Ducky. "I - I don - I'm - I'm - I not – I don't _ever _hit her!"

"We know, my boy."

"Maybe it's time you started," Gibbs says firmly. "It'd keep her mind on her _work_."

"Ah, yes, work," Ducky says, glad of the opportunity to end the banter. He removes the useless headwear. "Well, we've sent blood and the other usual specimens up to Abby. Miss Keitt wasn't strangled; I found no obstructions in her airway though the Internal Exam will confirm or refute that. There is, however, neither bruising nor any other surface injury. There are no ligature marks, no visible damage or swelling to the neck, lips or nose. There are no Petechial hemorrhages indicative of increase in blood pressure such as may be found in either smothering or strangulation. Thus far I've found no injuries, nor are there visible punctures indicating injections anywhere on her body."

They'd done a thorough check, even between her fingers and toes. "We've just prepared to begin, as I said, the internal examination. I shall notify you if I find anything."

"Notify Palmer," he says, gesturing to the woman to remain behind and heading for the elevator. "Meantime, keep those two away from sharp objects."

xxx

"Gibbs, I'm going to make a rule," Abby declares into the room as a whole as soon as the beeper over her door behind her announces his arrival. "You can't come down here less than two hours after I get evidence."

"How else can I make sure you're actually working?" When she turns he hands her a large white and red 'Caf-Pow!' cup to go with his large coffee.

"For this I'll work, believe me." She takes a mighty draught.

"I do."

"You have no idea how long I've waited for you to say those words."

"Forget it. I've already got one married agent I have to watch out for with her husband working down stairs, and I don't trust what McGee will be like in twelve more days. This alone is enough to make me swear off marriage."

"Really? I thought it was–"

"The specimens."

"No, Gibbs, I can't see what they'd have to do with marriage."

"Look harder."

"What, you think the wife did it?"

"Whenever a spouse dies, you look at the other one."

"Doesn't that break Rule 28?"

Gibbs had, long ago, grown tired of what he'd considered a 'knee-jerk' reaction of suspecting the spouse and had created for Kate and DiNozzo Rule 28: 'Sometimes the spouse didn't do it.'

"Gotta look somewhere, though."

"I think in this case you're going to have a lot of looking."

"How'd you do on the fingerprints?"

"Still running them, Michelle got a load of them, a lot are Darla Ventura's, a lot more are the Commander's, there's one set that's worthless. If a lot of pressure is used the ridges just flatten out with the valleys and you get nothing, just black ovals."

"What else?"

"I have Ducky's samples." She indicates a sectioned tray that holds ten upright tubes, each half filled with red blood. Another row of ten contains various other specimens. "I'm getting ready to do a whole series on poisons. Ducky said his preliminary exam of Cheryl Keitt doesn't turn up any gross disease. And you know me, Gibbs; when gross fails I turn to hinky."

He turns and walks away, but can't resist. "I thought you turn to–"

"Be nice, Gibbs, or I won't show you my new tattoo."

"I've seen it," he says as the door rings him out.

Abby smiles as she returns to her work. The day Gibbs can see _this _tat without her knowing it–

She stops, uncertain, and the smile falls from her lips.

Gibbs is not a liar.

xx

Barely into the bullpen, Gibbs calls for DiNozzo's report of Commander Robert Ventura's Service Record.

"Ventura heads up Supply for NAS Willow Grove, Pennsylvania; he's got a bunch of SKs under him. Decent Record, nothing of real significance; he's a Store Keeper who moved up to General Manager." His eyes on the screen, he doesn't see Gibbs' glare. "His performance is okay, minimal Security Rating, no access to secrets, tactical, pretty much a nothing. If there's a reason to hit him, I'm not finding it."

"Look harder."

DiNozzo doesn't say what he's thinking. "Assigned to NAS Willow Grove Air Base since 1994, the year it became a Joint Station, he's presently a chief shopkeeper. He re-uped two years ago for another four year hitch. Apparently his promotion to Commander was conditional on his sticking around."

"Navy likes to know its key personnel are going to be worth the investment."

"He bought the property in Maryland back in the 80's, they've used it as a summer home ever since, at least such summers as Ventura got to spend more than personal weekends away. He's been on Leave for the past few months, fixing it up."

They already know from Darla Ventura that the house is being renovated and winterized for when the Commander's final service is up in two more years. She'd told Gibbs she's made certain he will not rejoin for another four year term.

Before Gibbs can reply to this, Ziva comes around the corner of the partition to her desk. "Nice of you to join us, Officer Da-veed."

"I spent nearly an extra hour on that hillside picking up 223 pieces left behind by that tow." Her sharpness to her boss is telling enough.

"What about that accident?"

She doesn't answer until she reaches her desk and calls up information on her computer screen. "Without Forensics I had to make a lot of assumptions based on the factory specs of a 2006 Ford Crown Victoria. It is a straight run of 519 feet from one curve to the next where he went off the cliff, and I put his speed at anywhere from 38 to 50 miles per hour."

"No street lights. That road would be black as a cave at that hour."

"Perhaps Abby might contest me," she snaps, her twin emotional opinion of the scientist and frustration at being stuck on the hillside for so long coming through with deep bite, "but I have run every calculation I know. To have an initial impact on the incline of the hillside 73 feet from the road, I cannot account for a speed of less than 38 miles per hour. Abby will be getting the car by now. She says to give her six hours."

Everybody knows how likely that is.

"Background on Cheryl Keitt?"

"Cheryl Keitt," Ziva reports, calling up on her screen the information already compiled, at her request, by Special Agent Clark Bridges and forwarded to her computer during the drive in, "was a singer by profession. She sang with Gotham Chamber Opera in New York."

"Singing arias with the angels, now."

"DiNozzo." Sometimes the man's humor is questionable, at other times all doubt is removed.

"Sorry, boss."

"What else, Ziva?"

"That is all for 45 seconds in my chair."

He feels he's cracked the whip enough. His cell phone rings, he pulls it out. "Yeah, Gibbs."

/Agent Gibbs? Darla Ventura at your stupid 'safe house'. What did you find out?/

Maybe he hasn't cracked it enough.

xx

Impatience and driving force must ultimately give way to reality. It takes time to identify clues, even more to work out what they mean. At 1600 Gibbs finds himself with a familiar choice; push his people into another shift or wait for evidence and tests and researches to present information to fresh minds. In the end he tells himself it's not mercy or compassion that forces his hand. "Wrap it up."


	6. Strange Dreams and Nothing

Chapter Six  
Strange Dreams and Nothing

Tim McGee hovers on the tantalizing edge of a very strange dream. He's on a lake in a sailboat with a high red sail. The sky is clear, the lake placid but there's something pressing on his lower left ribs and something soft and wet is tickling...

He opens his eyes and recognizes the upper room in the Bed-and-Breakfast in County Wicklow, Ireland. The white alarm clock on the lace covered night table beside him reads 8:00, the pressure is still on his left ribs and something's….

He looks down. Siobhan's head is on him, she's looking at him, a shaft of bright sunlight turns her hair into a blazing red conflagration and she's licking his nipple with the side of her tongue. "Good morning," he says, quite at a loss to find anything else.

"Dia duit, a stór," she whispers, still pillowed on his ribs.

"Good morning, my darling," he repeats more comfortably, still half asleep. He decides to get his day's silly question out of the way first thing. "What are you doing?"

She smiles. "Having breakfast" then she gives him a faux pout. "But I can't get any milk."

He grabs her shoulders, enjoying her delighted laughter as he wrestles her onto her back, pulls the quilt off and covers her bare body with his, his head chest high. "You're the one with the milk." He gently but fervently proves his point, his lips making her gasp.

"A ghrá! Ooh my - ohhh–!" Her words dissolve into impassioned gasps. Long aroused before he woke, she reaches for him. Her hardening nipple trapped between his lips, gently sucked and licked, the sensual bolts flare through her body; she feels his hand slip down past her bare stomach and spreads her thighs...

xxx

Five thousand miles west and five hours back on the clock, a woman's soft voice drifts out of the blackness. "Jimmy, could I ask you something?"

He's barely brought awake at three in the morning. When he'd turned off the light it'd been two and he isn't sure he's really been to sleep.

There's no slumber in the voice beside him.

"Whaaaa?" He can't get his voice to sound alert. It's been an exhausting though happy night.

"Should I get my boobs enlarged?"

x

He's awake and alert, slaps the lamp beside him three times to bring the trio of small bulbs to full intensity and snatches his glasses from the night table, yanks them on, sits up and turns to her.

"_WHAT_?"

She's naked beside him, shielding her eyes from the glare. "I'm asking if you think I should get implan–"

"I heard what you said." He looks her bare body down and up and can only ask an emphatic "_WHY_?"

"You think I'm okay as I am?"

"Oh my _God_, 'Chelle, if we didn't – if I didn't just spend three hours convincing you then maybe _I'm _the one who needs enlarging."

"Don't you dare, you're big enough _already_."

"Well, so're you. What brought _this _on?"

She looks away. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do." She wouldn't wake him for anything that wasn't important. With their lifestyles, that was one of their first bedtime arrangements, and if she woke him this much for this...

"I was just thinking - of something - of the women at that haunted house - even of Abby and Director Shepherd…."

x

This is about the 'girl's night out' to the Grand Opening of the 'House on Haunted Hill' and the murderous debacle that followed? He'd seen pictures, quite a few, mostly on the website but "What about them?"

"Well, they were all so much taller - statuesque. No one really took their eyes off them. There was Barbarella, slave Leia with her gold…" she passes her hand over her chest to indicate the not-very-covering breast shields.

"And you were in that Vampirella outfit." He always loves her in - and out of - it.

"And I was so … small."

He's had enough of this and comes down to her, hands gripping her shoulders to pin her to the mattress, his face an inch above hers. "Now you listen to me right now, young lady. I don't want you changing _anything _about yourself. No breast enlargements, no tummy tuck–"

"What's wrong with my–?"

"_Shut up_." Her eyes widen in astonishment, she can't think of any response to this command. "Michelle Liza Palmer, I love you exactly as you are. I don't want you to change anything. I'm not going to love silicone or saline or Botox or–"

She throws her arms about his head, pulls his lips to hers.

Jimmy knows he's going to be very tired at work, but he'll spend the rest of the night assuring her.

xxx

"What've you got, Abby?"

Abby jumps slightly because the words beat the laboratory door beeper and that's no easy task. Gibbs is very energetic for eight-thirty in the morning, but she's been here all night and is ready for him. Still facing the uninformative graph upon her monitor, she tells him "I tested Cheryl Keitt's blood, urine, hair, the physical specimens I won't go into detail about, everything." She turns to him, making sure to give the momentous pronouncement everything it deserves. "And _guess _what I _found_!"

"What?"

"Come _on_, Gibbs, you never guess. Just this once. You'll never guess it. Pretty please."

"Arsenic?"

"Nope."

"Cyanide?"

"_Nope_!"

"Succinylcholine? Insulin? Strychnine?"

"Nope, nope and _NOPE_!"

"I'm done. Tell me."

Her uprising arms give the pronouncement a major flourish. "_NOTHING_!"

x

The silence hangs heavy in the air. "Nothing?"

"Gibbs, are you sure Jimmy didn't bring me Michelle's samples, or maybe Ziva's, because I've been here all night, I've run fifty-one tests, wore Major Mass Spec down to a nub and me along with him and chemically there is absolutely no reason for that woman to be dead. Aside from Ducky cutting open her chest and taking out her organs, that is." Hinky has gone to icky, but icky is immediately followed by fearful. "Gibbs, you don't think–?"

"Ducky doesn't make that mistake."

"No," she agrees, relieved to feel foolish, belatedly realizing that she really shouldn't have spent the entire night on these tests. "Not even Palmer could make that mistake."

"_Joe the Janitor_ couldn't. What killed her?"

She shrugs. "You'll have to ask Ducky. I'm stumped."

"Okay, what about Ventura?"

"From what Ducky tells me, he's as obvious as Keitt is mysterious. Fire. And so far I haven't gotten any specimens. Last I called, they were starting in again on Mystery a lá Keitt."

"Good job."

"Never mind 'good job'," she says, eyeing the rear lab. "I'm taking a nap."

xx

Ducky opens a cooler and slides out the charred body of Robert Ventura. "Your turn," a voice announces from behind him.

Ducky turns to Gibbs, uncertain what to make of this odd greeting. "That would be something I might say to our unfortunate guest here. In exactly what way is it my turn?"

"Abby struck out on Keitt's samples you sent up yesterday."

"_Indeed_?" This could be unprecedented. "In what way did she 'strike out'?"

"Seventeen at-bats, fifty-one misses. She can't find any forensic reason why Keitt's dead."

Intrigued, Ducky pushes the tray containing the charred husk back into the cooler and opens the door one to the right, draws out the cold shelf containing Cheryl Keitt. In addition to the standard 'Y-incision' which allowed her torso to be spread wide for examination, her throat had been opened and sewn back together.

Though someone, likely Palmer - where is he? - had smoothed out her hair, particularly the bangs that cover her forehead, Gibbs knows from yesterday's report that her skull had been opened and a portion of her brain was one of the samples sent up to Abby. He usually avoids too much thought on this before - or even after - breakfast.

"I admit I also could not find a definitive cause of death either," Ducky confesses, "which is why I'd decided to move on to the Commander and let information percolate, as it were, before returning to the lady. Her heart, liver, kidneys, most of her internal organs, in fact, were consistent with a woman in her mid-40's who is in generally good health. I did confirm that she suffered from asthma–"

"Got that. Could that have killed her?"

"I doubt it. No, she suffered from what I would classify as a mild case, treatable with OTC medication. Certainly for someone who depends upon excellent lung capacity - opera is a most demanding profession - I would say her level of the disease would be classified as inconvenient rather than debilitating."

He points to the woman's forehead. "I found nothing in her brain, no tumor or any other abnormality or injury that could account for her death. As that was one of the samples I forwarded, I perceive Abby found nothing either."

x

A healthy young - relatively - woman doesn't simply drop dead.

"_Could _she have been strangled or suffocated?" Yesterday no indications had been found on the surface, this time Ducky'd looked below that surface. Such a conclusion would point to the sister, but it's too soon to reach any conclusion.

"Well, while Petechial hemorrhaging is often found as an indication of suffocation due to marked increase in blood pressure, I saw nothing that might have led to that in the bedroom - which itself is meaningless if she _was _murdered."

"Ya think?"

Ducky decides to ignore the sarcasm, pointing instead to the woman's face. "Now in pressure suffocation, such as a pillow being pressed to the face, there is frequently damage to the lips, nose, cheeks or occasionally the tongue, should the victim bite it in the struggle." He peels back her lips. "I found nothing there." He straightens again.

"Now, in such cases as asphyxiation from an obstruction such as, say, a plastic bag placed over the head, the hemorrhaging in the lungs as well as about the eyes, et cetera, is much more severe and atelextasis is indicative of shallow but forced breathing as though through some obstruction. The eyes are frequently found wide, the tongue often swells and protrudes and the lungs also suffer from rupturing of the capillaries. Suffice it to say, I haven't found anything, certainly not one of the 'usual suspects'. You know, this reminds me of an incident I came across in the early '70's–"

"Duck?"

"Yes?"

"Is this relevant?"

Ducky considers the early hour. "I suppose not."

He'll tell Mr. Palmer about it later when the young man comes in – from wherever he's gotten to now.

x

"No strangling her, no suffocating, no asthma attack?" Gibbs doesn't like asking a question a second time; Ducky's the only one who can elicit such a thing without it being accompanied by a head-slap. This mysterious death once again places suspicion back on Darla Ventura, if he's to believe her testimony that she was alone with Keitt...

"Well, in strangulation cases, as you know, we look for damage to the trachea, the windpipe, to subdural injury to the muscles in the neck where bruising could occur, and so forth. There is also a small, comparatively fragile bone called the hyroid, located right here," he touches the appropriate spot on the woman's throat. "It most closely resembles a small wishbone and damage or breakage is almost always indicative of manual or ligature strangulation, more often so in the former." He slides the tray back into the cooler. "I found no such damage." He closes the door.

"Actually, I recall a case in which a blood pressure cuff was the weapon of choice. As the cuff was inflated it applied pressure to the throat from all sides along a much wider area. Since strangulation usually involves a much more narrow focus of pressure, such as that imparted by cord or hands, the investigators in the case were at first at a loss to explain the lack of focused damage."

Gibbs hadn't seen any medical supplies in the Maryland bedroom, an exception that means exactly nothing. He'll add that to the search list and Palmer's affidavit for the warrant.

x

"Now there is a possibility of 'positional asphyxia', which cannot be ruled out in someone suffering from asthma. Unfortunately, her body was moved and I cannot say if her position in any way restricted her air flow."

Disturbance of the corpse has always been the most aggravating aspect of forensic investigation, most especially from a pathologist's point of view. This time Ducky restrains himself from venting, deciding to make up for it by venting twice next time.

"Could it have been something she ate?"

"An allergic reaction? It's eminently possible, though you said Abby ruled out many of the most likely causes. I await the result of her toxological examination, which I expect will take some time, perhaps later than this evening. When I spoke to Abby last, those fifty-plus tests did not include that significant one."

"She's been at it all night. She's getting some rest."

"So I expect." He doesn't intend to imply the woman should be further burdened, but this is a ripe mystery. "There were almost no stomach contents, however," he explains. "This was fortunate as it made the locating of a small yellow pill quite easy. Apparently it is all she had had to eat in several hours."

This is the first time he's heard anything about a pill. "What kind of pill?"

"At the moment I'm uncertain."

"_Guess_."

Ducky heaves a sigh of long suffering. "Jethro, in Forensic Pathology, as in other scientific disciplines, one does not _guess_. One makes careful observations and accumulates data from a wide variety of resources, compiles the data, analyzes it closely and scrupulously in an attempt to draw a supportable conclusion that may be presented in a court of law and will stand up under cross examination."

Gibbs hadn't expected such a response and might say he was sorry if it didn't violate Rule 6. He does, however, feel suitably chastised. "Can you give me any idea?"

Ducky nods. "I'm guessing Primatene."

x

'Why didn't I see that coming?' "Primatene."

"It paints an interesting picture, does it not? Rather than being smothered by an assailant, she perhaps felt an asthma attack coming on, though I found no indication of recent constriction, and took the appropriate medication, though I await Abby's analysis in order to be certain. From the condition of her lungs I judge that Miss Keitt would have survived the bout with nothing more than inconvenience and a difficulty sleeping therefore, yet in a very few minutes she died."

"Why? You said it wasn't an asthma attack. What else could've killed her?"

Ducky doesn't sigh, not wanting to waste his breath. He'd wanted to move on to the body most firmly within their jurisdiction because he doesn't yet _have _that answer. Additionally, Cheryl Keitt is not the wife of a Navy Officer but the wife's sister and may well not be termed a 'dependant'. Yet it seems Commander Ventura will have to wait.

Still, his death in a rolling crash down a hill and a long time spent in the middle of an inferno is less mysterious - on the surface - in the _manner_ of death. Cause is yet to be determined and in due time he expects he will. In the meantime, he will have Gibbs assist in transferring the woman's body to the first table.

"When I know, you'll know."

xxx

Gibbs gives Abby an hour - if she stayed in she can work and leave early - before he calls her. A half hour later he's beside the scientist.

He announces his arrival with a large cup of 'Caf-Pow!' passed over her right shoulder. She snatches it, takes a mighty twenty-second draw before she turns, her bleary eyes actually clearing as he watches.

"Duck Man was right," Abby tells him, revving up to 45 on a 33.3 turntable. "Primatene, 200 milligrams of guaifenesin and 12.5 milligrams of ephedrine per tablet, the dosage suitable for the relief of mild flare-ups of asthma. Keitt had a packet in her purse." Abby holds up the blister packet within a clear Evidence bag, two of the yellow pills are gone. "And no indication of the drug in her system."

"Placebo?"

"No, it was real," she assures him, hardly able to credit that he would ask. The second huge gulp through the straw nearly drains the 32oz cup.

"Go easy on that."

"Actually, I'm hoping you'll bring me another before you go upstairs. I'm heading down to look over Ventura's car and I could really use a keep-me-up."

"What's the dosage?" Ducky had found only one pill and after his faux diatribe Gibbs doubts the man missed anything.

"Two cups should get me through the morning."

"The _Primatene_!"

"Oh. One pill upon onset of the problem, but it wasn't dissolved, just the outer layer was affected."

"So you're saying she had an asthma attack, took her med but died anyway?"

"In a very short time, barely a few minutes. I'll have to run tests on the dissolution rate of the pill when taken on an empty stomach, the manufacturer's public announcement is too vague, you know, the 'within five minutes' crap. Her blood gas levels were way up, but it's not unusual to have elevated CO2 levels when you die. They almost always go up because you stop breathing but the cells keep using the adjacent blood's oxygen until it's gone."

"How high were Keitt's?"

"Well, bear in mind they're up far more often than not, usually way up, but if we were at a Carnival she'd definitely win the Kewpie doll."


	7. Motive

Chapter Seven  
Motive

Gibbs enters the bullpen in poor humor. Too much of this case is off the beam and a glance at the Mardi Gras float that used to be McGee's desk doesn't improve his mood.

When he sees Ziva standing before DiNozzo's desk, one look is enough to make him decide he should have stayed home. The woman's taste in attire is not as eclectic as Abby's, but this morning she's outdone the Scientist.

She's attired completely in black leather which fits her like a second skin, the shiny material catching the light from zippered collar to polished black boots.

He decides the easiest thing for his blood pressure is to not even ask. "Ziva, throw Keitt's medical records onto the plasma."

Without a word, she returns to her desk, movement that is not in itself sensual, but in that skin tight– "All right, Da - veed, what's going on?"

She halts in mid-stride. "On?" His glare warns her that this is not a good time. "I have been speaking with Abby, she has suggested a change in style. 'Broaden my horizons', she said."

"Change back."

He doesn't give her a chance to reply but heads on to his desk. As he does so, however, he notices DiNozzo's stare. Ziva had been close to him before, but now that she's returning to her desk he's trying to count the molecules in her cat suit. "DiNOZZO!"

"Yes, boss. Sorry."

They're saved from further confrontation by the activation of the plasma screen.

x

Several pages appear in layered windows which Ziva summarizes. "Cheryl Keitt was in good health at the time of her last check-up four months ago. The only thing of note is persistent though sporadic asthma."

"Asthma must be pretty severe for an Opera singer," DiNozzo puts in.

"I spoke to her physician, a Doctor Blanca Cruz. Apparently it was more of an inconvenience than a problem. Over-the-counter medications kept it in check."

"Any reason Cruz would have for Keitt's dying of it?"

"None."

"What do you have on her?"

"Cheryl Keitt, 42, is unmarried, lives at 7218 Third Avenue, Apartment 4, Bay Ridge Brooklyn. She works as a singer, primarily Classical Opera but has been 'between gigs' since La Traviata closed on February 21. She supplements her income with singing for churches, synagogues and Community groups."

Twenty eight days now, not too significant, it seems. "Life Insurance? Beneficiary?"

"A single $20,000 policy with her sister as beneficiary."

"These days," Tony interjects, "after funeral expenses, Darla would get car fare home and had better hope she makes it."

x

"DiNozzo, Ventura."

"An SK GM." He notices Gibbs' glare just in time. "Shopkeeper – which you do know, of course. The Commander is in charge, so I guess that makes him a General Manager."

"Use the right parlance." He'd let him get away with it yesterday and decides he's getting soft.

"Yes, boss. So far as I can tell he's never been in combat, never had access to anything remotely secret. Due to retire in two years, he's had an unspectacular career to date and no reason to think that'll change. Certainly not our run-of-the-mill victim."

"How much Insurance does he have?"

"A hundred thirty grand total."

"The wife makes out better on him," Ziva observes. "She may not now be considered a 'rich widow', but she will be considered 'walled off'."

"Well off," DiNozzo can't help correcting. "You'd _think _so, wouldn't you? Motive and opportunity - except she's _not _the prime beneficiary. She gets fifty K - unless she would've died first. Either way the bulk of the estate goes to an Alan Slater, no address in the Insurance record. There are five Alan Slaters on the East Coast, I'm still sorting through them, but I wonder what the loving Missus Ventura will say about not being on top of the list."

"So you think she offed him for the hundred thirty thousand?" Gibbs asks, mainly to test.

"If so, she has one hell of a surprise coming." He's not certain he wants to be in earshot when she finds out.

x

Gibbs turns to Michelle. "How long has Abby had the car?" Her eyes are closed and she doesn't move. He steps over and kicks the front of her metal desk, the loud '_tang'_ makes her jump, startled back to alertness. "You _with_ us?"

She recovers quickly. "Of course, sir."

"Good." He leans in on her desk. "How * LONG * has * _Abby * _had * the * _CAR_?"

"I don–" she bites back the fearful answer barely in time, looks at the clock on the wall. "Sixteen hours, about, sir."

"She should have some answers by now," he says, pushing off.

"Abby put in all night on blood and body tests," she ventures.

"She needs an assistant," he declares, reversing his usual position.

"I hear Chip Sterling's looking for wor–."

"_That supposed to be funny, DiNozzo_?"

"Well, now that you put it that way–"

"I'm going to see it for myself," he declares. He passes close enough to give DiNozzo a resounding head-smack.

x

When he's gone Michelle leans toward DiNozzo past McGee's float. "I think I've _finally _figured you out."

"I have been trying for nearly four years," Ziva interjects.

"You're a masochist. You _like _getting slapped."

"I d– I do not!"

"You must. You put yourself up for it twice in less than five minutes. You're a masochist."

"I am not. And you were _asleep_."

"Was not, I was meditating."

"Yeah, right; meditating on a pillow."

"Do not be ashamed of it, Tony," Ziva advises, unwilling to let the opportunity pass. "Some of my best friends are masochists." She halts, wide-eyed realization lightening her face. "_That _is why you were so interested in Samantha Sky when she worked here. You two have so much in common."

"I - _What_?"

"You are both sexual masochists."

Michelle cuts in with "I heard from Abby that you visited a couple of times since Sammy moved in."

"I have not! Besides, how–?"

"One time was when the Director, Abby and I were away for that Haunted House weekend."

"Getting tied down in your work?" Ziva enquires.

"NO!"

x

"Oh, that is right," Ziva conveniently 'remembers', "Sammy is not a masochist, she just likes to be tied up. Were you two reviewing the latest bondage gear?""

"So which was it, Agent DiNozzo?" Michelle asks sweetly. To her, Ziva's outfit of black leather from neck to boots could not be more perfect for the day. "Did you tie her up or did she beat you? Or did you two do both?"

"At the same time?" Ziva is dubious.

"That makes one interesting picture."

"So tell us, Tony," Ziva urges, "did Abby's coffin enter into this little session?"

"If so," Michelle grins, "_she'll _be the one doing the whipping."

"Does Jeanne know about this secret side of you?"

"I am _not _a masochist!"

"Have it your way, Tony," Ziva says smugly. "But I know now what I am going to get you for your birthday."

"Fur bondage cuffs?" Michelle asks.

"Bush league. I am getting him a set of leather straps that crisscross his torso in all different configurations, so I can lead him about as a bondage slave."

"Listen ladies–!"

"I've always pictured Agent DiNozzo hogtied and with a ball gag in his mouth," Michelle smirks. Until now she'd been feeling very tired after the intense night, but a scare from Special Agent Gibbs and a chance to give some torment back to Tony DiNozzo are very invigorating.

"You're scary, Probette. But I–"

"Actually," Ziva cuts in, "my image goes more to him in tiny leather briefs, hanging by his hands from a pulley while I smear butter all over him. Then I..." She leaves it, and him, dangling.

"_My _image," Michelle says with a scarier smile, "involves him naked, tied spread eagle on a bed and I have this huge red feather–"

"Oh, I have seen that," Ziva enthuses. "Of course, a leather mask is essential."

"Absolutely."

"Is there not some magical method that will–?"

"That's enough!" Tony had had more than enough four speculations ago.

"Actually I _do _have this special oil. You spread it on his thingy – rock hard for a _week_."

"I said 'that's _enough_'!"

"Oh, we are only getting started," Ziva assures him.

Until now, Tony DiNozzo had never considered being outnumbered 2 - 1 by beautiful women to be a bad thing.

xxx

Gibbs enters the garage to find Abby's feet sticking out from under the driver door of the blackened, half-melted remnant of the 2006 Ford Crown Victoria. The vehicle is elevated on cinderblocks two feet off the floor. Not only had the heat of the fire blown all the tires but three hours in the inferno has melted them and all other soft surfaces to piles of goo in the charred woodlands on the Maryland hill.

It's impossible to distinguish the original color of the blackened and partially melted wreck, only the file upstairs reveals that the car had been red. Neither can he select a single color for Abby's socks. The latter are a mad conglomeration of stripes that would reduce any rainbow to tears. "I just left the witch," Gibbs says.

"_I'll get you, my pretty_," she replies with a high-pitched cackle.

"You always wear those for working under things?"

"Someday," she assures him in her normal voice, "I'm going to perfect the toe/foot curl and really freak you out." She rolls out from under the car, first turned up blue jeans, inner side raised high enough to clear the rainbow socks, the inside several shades lighter than the outside, and next a black tee shirt that has to be a size too small. She's put her pig tails into round circles atop her head to keep them out of the way and there's a spot of soot on the tip of her nose.

He tries not to think of Minnie Mouse.

x

When she reaches up and he clasps her hand and boosts her up he decides he'd prefer Minnie, for her black tee shirt has several words written on two lines between her impressive breasts and several ovals surrounding each breast.

The white words are 'Fingerprint Analysts do it with their hands' and the ovals are distinct fingerprints, thumb prints on the inner sides, four ovals ascend the outer sides and curve along the tops. "_Abby_." She's had tremendous leeway through the years, genius can buy much, but this is not just pushing the envelope, this is slapping it in the face.

"What's the matter, Gibbs? Give you ideas?"

"No." He examines the artwork, for such it is, while she stands smiling at him. "I'm afraid to think of whose prints those are."

With a wider smile she starts at the pinky 'pressing' her right breast. "That's Kevin Lamb," she trails up the ovals and down over the top, "Mike Kingman, _Tony_, Paul Krey and Fred Higgins." She starts up her left breast, "Sammy, I can't leave Sammy out; Ken Templeton, Patrick Larsen, cause if I'm going to include Sammy I _have_ to include Ken and Patrick though I don't think they'd really be interested; this one is Tim, though Siobhan would probably kill me and _this_ one is…." She looks up coyly and her smile is slow but wide.

"Abby," he's in the odd position of being the one who usually supports her, "this isn't appropriate. Take it off." With an even wider smile she tugs the shirt from her jeans. "_Later_!"

His command nearly echoes through the huge chamber but, though she stops, her smile doesn't diminish. "I can wait."

He gives her his hardest glare, not confident it'll have the effect it would on anyone else. "_Tell_ me about the _car_."

x

At least the smile vanishes as she turns off the teasing as though throwing a switch. "I can tell you that Commander Ventura didn't do himself any favors by having a load of construction stuff in the back seat, passenger seat and trunk. Those stacks of lumber were enough to keep this car a torch. How long did you say it burned?"

"It took out most of the woods for fifty feet around, and the crews three hours to get it out and get to the car."

Part of that likely exaggerated estimate, he believes, has to do with the cooling-off time for the red hot steel. It could not be hit with water for fear of washing away a massive amount of evidence, so it had had to be left to burn out while the efforts of the firemen had been concentrated on keeping the fire under control within that fifty foot area. There was nothing that could have been done to save Ventura; he'd have been dead within moments of that fiery crash. Partially melted steel, in fact, is pretty much all that remains of the car, everything else is consumed or reduced to puddles of detritus inhabiting several bags in the woman's lab upstairs.

Abby reaches for a tall white and red plastic cup set upon a tall tool case and takes a massive draught, finishing the remaining third of the beverage.

"How many of those have you had?" Considering the shirt, he suspects she's suffering now from caffeine poisoning.

"This is the second." She doesn't flinch under his stare. "I swear." His eyes flick to the cup on the table on the other side of the car. He'd seen that one when he came in. "Okay, second of four, I hadn't finished it earlier."

"Abby."

"Gibbs, if you want to keep me here today you'll let me stay 'Pow!'-ered up."

He should send her packing, but she's needed so he just shakes his head, giving up. There's no way, short of handcuffing her and posting guards, to stop the woman from using her fuel of choice, and he'd been the one who'd pushed her to complete the analysis of yesterday's samples. He focuses his attention on her eyes, still refusing to see how the reconfigured pigtails and the black soot mark on her nose conjure images of Minnie Mouse.

Better Minnie than this damned shirt staring at him.

x

"Ventura was Mr. Crispy long before then," Abby says, answering his previous point and contemplating the monumental blaze but oblivious of its after-effect on her. "Ducky must not have much to work with."

"He doesn't." The corpse has no right arm, half of the left, little of either leg, while the torso and head are blackened crisps of hairless, charred meat drawn tightly to bones.

"Well, the air bags deployed, which probably did more harm than good if they didn't collapse in time for him to get out. I've got a major 'reconstruction' job here."

He knows she doesn't mean reconstructing the destroyed car but the circumstances that caused it to become such. "That fluid sample we sent?"

She nods. "Brake fluid, but it was hinky."

He gives her a moment. "How was it hinky?"

"Too fresh."

"You can find out how fresh brake fluid is?" It's not motor oil.

"Sure, Gibbs. Anything picks up impurities, this didn't have any."

"You think he had it changed recently?"

"Very recently. But if there was a long running problem the mechanic would've spotted a leak and changed the hose. So it might've happened right after the fluid was changed; that or someone poured it fresh out of the container onto the asphalt."

That's an unpleasant thought he can't dismiss. "_Was _there a problem with the brake line?"

He considers the possibility that Darla Ventura had murdered her sister, got out to the car while her husband was inside the house and sabotaged it for the downhill drive. Did she have the time?

"Sorry, Gibbs, that's why I went under there first. I just can't tell. The fire melted the line, so all I can say for sure is it was attached at each end."

x

Her cell phone rings. When she pulls it from her belt the ID reads 'Z. David'. "It's Ziva. By the way, how do you like her new look?" She doesn't pause long enough for him to give his opinion of David's neck-to-boots leather, more appropriate to a 'biker-babe' than an NCIS Special Agent.

He intends today to be the last day he sees the woman dressed like that. Between her and Abby, the women of NCIS are getting a bit too liberal and it's probably time to crack down on this.

"Hello? Yes, I'm in the garage. I'd up your original number by at least 600 pounds. There's a whopping amount of wood, shingles, a crapload of crap. Yes, he's here." She passes over the phone.

"Gibbs." He can hear computer keystrokes clicking under her words.

/I have access to Commander Ventura's credit card and bank records and still trying to pull Mrs. Ventura's, but the reason I called is that upping the car's weight that much, to reach the first impact point 75 feet from the edge of the cliff … he had to have … been going … a minimum of .../ the keystrokes replace her ever lengthening words, and finally they stop and she speaks normally, /49 miles an hour./

"Send Palmer and DiNozzo down to the truck." He snaps the phone closed, hands it back to Abby, pulls out his handkerchief and wipes the smudge from her nose.

His own phone rings. Pulling it out, he reads 'Shepherd' on the screen and thumbs it open, his greeting as succinct as always.

/Jethro, what do you have on the Ventura case?/

"Lots of questions, very few answers." He hopes his succinctness conveys how little he has without his actually having to say it.

Apparently it does. /A preliminary as soon as possible. Have you seen Abby? She's not in her lab and her cell's busy./

"She's here." He hands the phone to her, reflecting that they should have dual lines.

"Hello?"

/Abby, as soon as you can, come up and see me./

"Be right up." She hands Gibbs' phone back to him and starts for the elevator.

"_Hey_!" When she turns, her white lab coat hits her in her chest.


	8. Twists and Turns

Chapter Eight  
Twists and Turns

Abby, white lab coat discreetly buttoned to hide the shirt that'd been intended only for Gibbs' eyes or those of his team, enters the outer office of Director Jennifer Shepherd and greets Cynthia Sumner with as casual a wave as she can manage. Sumner reaches for the intercom button, announces the scientist's arrival and receives clearance.

Inside, Shepherd looks up from the file folder in her hands and she sets it on the desk.

The sun shining upon Shepherd from the large window overlooking the Navy Yard seems to give her an Angelic aspect, but Abby is never fooled, being herself the Mistress of Images. Is she here to receive celestial commendation or condemnation? "Come in, close the door."

Abby does so, not certain if she should be nervous over this summons. She'd worn her provocative shirt all day, hadn't really thought much beyond the humor – but did someone take offense and it reach this high? "Whatever I did, I assure you I didn't do it."

"No, but you're going to," Shepherd tells her with a disarming smile that washes away some of her nervousness. "Sit down," she invites.

Emboldened by Shepherd's ease, Abby takes the proffered seat.

"I'll come right to the point, since both of us have a lot to get back to. I've been in touch with representatives of 'The Science Channel' and they would like you to host a segment on their upcoming cable series 'The History of Forensics', specifically its advancements 1901 to 2000."

This is a lot better than being in trouble. "Sure!"

"It's an hour segment, 57 minutes actually, which is one of the reasons they asked for you and not Ducky." They share a grin; the venerable man can do 57 minutes on the introduction. "You'll be doing on-screen hosting and voiceover narration of dramatic reenactments and animation footage. They've sent the script and some of the footage already shot, you can check it for accuracy and tailor it a bit so it sounds natural, but you shouldn't change too much without their say so."

"Of course. I'm sure it'll be accurate; I watch the Science Channel all the time. Thanks, this'll be great. When do they want me?"

"Next Wednesday, you can have the day off unless we have a real disaster in the meantime, but I doubt we'll have that much that can't hold a day." They both know better than to make firm predictions.

"Thank you. I look forward to it."

"That's all."

"Thank you." She's out of her seat and across the room when Shepherd's voice calls her attention.

"Just one thing," the woman says and she looks back. "I'd appreciate it if you would keep the image of NCIS in mind when choosing a less-than-flamboyant wardrobe."

"Oh, of course," she promises. There has to be something 'not-so-flamboyant' in the back of one of her closets. Somewhere.

"You won't be covering 'Fingerprint Analysis'."

Abby feels the smile fall off her face. "No, Director," she agrees flatly.

xxx

Gibbs, DiNozzo and Palmer, who'd much rather go back home to bed, have picked Darla Ventura up from the Safe House, an anonymous home in the Washington suburbs where she's being guarded by Special Agent Marie Watson.

While DiNozzo and Palmer bring the woman out to the car, Gibbs remains behind with Watson. "What have you got?"

"She's still fixated on loss, still deep in grief. She can't understand why God would take her sister and husband, especially the way He did."

Gibbs sees the hand of God in none of this. "The sister was an asthmatic but Ducky says it was mild. The Commander wouldn't have been speeding on a dark, winding road." He pulls back from the conclusion. Would the man be so shaken by his sister-in-law's death? He doubts it. A Navy man, even a Storekeeper 'executive', doesn't get flustered easily. He takes out his phone; it's at this point that he'd call McGee.

"Ziva, look into the Commander's activities, did he have anything going on with Keitt? Copy Watson." He closes the phone without waiting for an answer. There are all sorts of motives for double murder, and until now this one hadn't occurred to him. "When we bring her back," he tells Watson, "I want you to keep digging until you're sure. If there was something, find out if she knew."

xxx

"Now when we go in," Gibbs instructs Darla Ventura as they get out of his Charger before the blue and white mountainside bungalow, "I want to know everything you can see that's different from the last time you were here." He hadn't spoken to her during the trip, he wants to watch her face to see her reaction to anything he says.

"Last summer?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she says dubiously, sounding uncertain why this matters. Inside the house, she looks around. "Well, Bob had moved that chair over there, I put it back. Those pictures were on that wall, I put them where they belong."

"I meant with the house." Gibbs knows building, he can certainly tell new things from old, but without floor plans he cannot tell precisely what Ventura had spent three months reconstructing.

"Well, that wall's gone." She points to the left, to the kitchen. "There used to be a wall between the living room and kitchen." The combined space now takes up the whole front half of the house, from living room right to patio walls. "And there was a lot done on the patio."

"Show us."

They go through the kitchen and inner door to an enclosed patio that extends from front of the house to rear and looks as though it hadn't been part of the original structure even before winterizing. Gibbs had already noted the difference in the foundation when he'd inspected the outside.

"He put in a lot of insulation, redid the bathroom, and in the bedroom the walls used to be fake panels, why I don't know, but he replaced them with real wood and added the drop ceiling throughout."

"What more was he going to do?"

She looks at him blankly. He usually feels an urge to dispose of such an expression, should one of his team present it to him, with a slap to the back of the head but can't use that method now.

"I don't know. Not much, I suppose."

Gibbs would suppose so as well. The house, as is, looks perfectly acceptable. Large living room with bedroom beyond it, den opposite that behind the kitchen with bath in between, enclosed patio... "Palmer."

"Yes, sir?"

"Stay here, we're going down into the town. I want a record of everything that was done in this place when we get back. You know what to look for."

"Yes, sir." She knows indeed. She's to conduct a low-key interrogation that won't alert their prime suspect to her new status.

Returning with Gibbs to the waiting car, DiNozzo wonders "It looks to me like a done job. I know some people who'd be happy here."

"Then why was Ventura's car stuffed with more than 600 pounds of building supplies he'd picked up that evening?"

xx

The drive down the snaking road is a white-knuckle trip for DiNozzo. Granted there are guardrails, but the hill falls off from the other lane, vanishes into empty air.

"Commander Ventura took this hill at 49 miles an hour. It was pitch black beyond the range of the headlights and on that stretch he didn't slow or turn."

"Could he have slowed _to _49?" DiNozzo speculates, doubting it. That fast is too high in the bright sunlight and he wishes Gibbs would slow too. He doesn't like the way his stomach knocks against his diaphragm at the top of every rise and tries to escape out his bowels at the base of every dip.

"Abby says the brake line was attached at either end, but the line itself melted."

"You figure the wife went and cut the line while hubby was checking sis?"

"I don't know." He accelerates slightly. "Too many things aren't fitting."

"Well, in the meantime, couldn't you slow down _too_?"

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. _For the sake of future DiNozzo's_, perhaps."

"Not much of an incentive."

"Heh heh."

As they descend, Gibbs picks up speed. His normal headlong pace is okay on a flat road, not when winding down a bobbing, snaking road. "Boss?" DiNozzo finally ventures as they descend, turn right and enter the stretch of road toward the un-guard-railed turn where Ventura had lost his life.

"What is it, DiNozzo?"

"You're not going to take us off that cliff at 50 miles an hour, are you?"

"No, DiNozzo, I wouldn't do that." He increases speed slightly on the death stretch toward the vacant spot in the guard rail ahead.

"Well, good, because you had me wor–"

"Ziva estimates 49."

The turn is coming up fast. "Boss?" It's coming up too fast! "_Boss_?" Tony grips the front board, wishes he'd gone to church. "_BOSS_?"

At the last instant Gibbs twists the wheel right, tires shriek but DiNozzo bites back his own as the edge of the cliff comes too close, far too close, then shifts away. Gibbs fights the car back into the right lane, applies the brakes and the car drifts to a stop. Granted they didn't have 600 extra pounds of lumber, but now that he's felt the slope and the forces involved, he's satisfied. "Yes?" He turns to his white friend. "Hey, you okay?"

DiNozzo peals his fingers off the glove dash. "You ever hear the expression 'at 65, Saint Christopher gets out and walks'?"

"Then you had nothing to worry about. We were doing 49."

xxx

"That always sticks," Darla Ventura says as Michelle pushes the bedroom door closed.

"Your–" She bites it off. She had been about to ask why, with all the renovations Robert Ventura had done, he hadn't gotten rid of so simple a problem. A few moments with a palm plane would trim the wood, but the man has died barely 40 hours ago and will fix nothing ever again.

"Tell me about your husband," she says instead, sitting down on the edge of the large bed beside the older woman. She'd had the renovation tour - with four rooms and a bath it hadn't taken long - but Ventura had been unable to sleep in the Safe House and wants to rest. The bed has been stripped of sheets and cases, all the bedclothes brought to Abby's lab. She could send for the bed as well if she were to decide she needs it but it's quite large and could possibly damage the door unless it's disassembled. Gibbs doesn't favor disassembling anything in the house unless it must be done.

Darla sits down upon the bed, resting her back against the footboard before Michelle can stop her, and to Michelle the mattress looks very comfortable after a sleepless night of intense sexercise. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to rest for a bit on the end?

"He was the sweetest, gentlest, most loving man in the world," Darla says mournfully. "Always doing something for someone else."

Michelle smiles. "Sounds like my husband."

"Tell me about him?"

"I'd rather hear about yours." She's not here to discuss Jimmy. She's supposed to determine if this woman _killed _her sister and husband. "Where did you meet him?"

"We met at–" She breaks off, gasping hard. Michelle knows she's trying to keep from crying again. As Darla pants, trying to regain control, Michelle racks her brain to come up with a subject that will be less emotional. Thus far, she hasn't had much success.

xx

Gibbs and DiNozzo arrive in town, a community that reminds Gibbs of home, that blend of rustic and sub-suburban that for decades seemed to characterize Middle Americana. He expects to turn a corner and come upon a red brick General Store or perhaps a plate-glass fronted Malt Shoppe.

"Where do you suppose we should start?" DiNozzo asks.

"Ventura told us her husband'd gotten the wood at Strucker's." He pulls the car up beside a glass and metal, hinge-door telephone booth, as much a 21st Century anachronism as anything they've seen thus far. That it has a telephone book suspended from a chain is even more of an anomaly. "When we finish there, I have some questions for the Troopers and that Sheriff."

xxx

Michelle stretches, trying to do it discretely. She'd finally gotten the woman talking, reflecting on more pleasant days, and doesn't want Ventura to think she's getting bored by the recollections. She's not bored, but she _is _tired. 'Last time I pull an all-nighter with my legs wrapped around Jimmy's hips.' She grins, cautious that the woman doesn't see. 'Yeah, _right_!'

That hadn't been their only position by far, and Jimmy really does have so much stamina. 'More than I do right now,' she reflects, feeling her eyes start to droop. She used to cheat, drawing on the power of the cosmos and getting a reputation with him of being insatiable, but now she's just tired. Her head is heavier than when she'd been caught drifting off at her desk.

"I remember once," Darla continues, "we drove to New York, the two of us, to see Cher perform in 'La Bohéme'." She sighs heavily. "She really does - did - have such a beautiful voice. Okay, it wasn't Lincoln Center, you probably need contacts as much as talent to get there," she sighs, "but it was spectacular nonetheless. We went to Junior's later, the food was great, but the cheesecake - to die for."

'Would she get mad if I lay back?' Michelle thinks wistfully. 'Better not, her sister _died _on this bed.' She's not sure how Darla can sit here and wonders if it means anything that she can.

But keeping her eyes open is becoming more of a chore.

xx

Gibbs and DiNozzo step out onto the curb in front of 'Strucker's Lumber, Est. 1894'. Old Mr. Strucker, possibly not the original but DiNozzo isn't sure, had been helpful though not informative. Ventura had indeed been there the evening before last to pick up molding, lumber and other supplies. Strucker and the agents had gone over the list of several months worth of orders, but Gibbs found nothing remarkable in any of it.

Even the latest order was well explained – Ventura was going to build a trio of dog houses before getting the dogs. Apparently, though Darla prefers cats, Robert had always wanted dogs. It was a simple explanation, right up to the point where the order had been picked up at 2:30.

Looking up and down the street in an attempt to get a better sense of the town, Gibbs wonders "If Ventura had the stuff at 2:30, why'd he tell his wife it wouldn't be ready until after dark?"

"Did he?" That's one of the problems when the only testimony comes from the witness who's the potential suspect.

"She said he got in at ten."

"Let's assume he did."

"Okay. If he did, he hung around town with a car full of building supplies for over 5 hours." He looks about the intersection. "Doing what?"

"Let's find out."

DiNozzo grins. "I know what I'd do."

"Yeah, DiNozzo, I know. But he hadn't seen his wife in three months. Not knowing Keitt was there, he'd figure she's been just as lonely."

"You mean why get take-out when he's got an entrée waiting at home?"

Gibbs' hand comes up fast and hard, but then he reconsiders. "Yeah."

"All right," Tony says, holding his head and trying not to glare, "if he did go straight home, then did he _and_ the Missus kill Keitt?"

"If so, I hope there's a motive. It's not money, her insurance is twenty thousand. If something was going on between Ventura and Keitt, whose motive covers Keitt's death? Darla Ventura says he didn't know she was up there, but if he did know then why kill her where only two people could be the suspects? Why not take her out in Brooklyn? And if they did kill her, why the mad dash down the hill? It wouldn't be to get help; he'd take his time for that. And that much weight added to the car, Abby says an additional 600 pounds, would throw the inertia off on that turn. We did it at 49, he'd've had a harder time with it but he _could've_ made it. He knows the road in light _and_ dark."

"Break fluid," Tony reminds him.

"I haven't forgotten, but like Abby says, it's too hinky. The fluid seemed new, what mechanic changes it and doesn't notice a leak in the line? With as much as leaked into the parking area, Ventura should've noticed something long before the crash."

The more Gibbs turns this case over in his head, the worse he likes it. "Let's look around; see if he _did _stay in town until dark."

xxx

Michelle, mentally drifting, gradually becomes aware that something is missing in the conversation with Darla Ventura. It takes her some time, but eventually it comes to her that what's missing is words.

She forces her head up. All unnoticed, it had drooped forward. Opening her eyes is almost too much of a challenge. Focusing, blinking away sleep and refocusing, she finds Ventura slumped against the footboard, apparently asleep.

It slowly filters through Palmer's sleep-addled mind that this is wrong. Sitting up is a chore but, fighting her own lethargy, she manages to get further down to the end of the bed. She grasps and shakes Ventura's shoulder. "Mrs. Ventura?" No movement. "Mrs. Ventura?"

This is too wrong. She pushes herself off the mattress and staggers, clutches the bedpost but nearly misses, nearly slams to the floor. She clings tightly to the wood, the room tilting. Her body feels like it weighs five hundred pounds. She shakes her head hard, can't clear it, lets go of the post, takes a step and staggers when the room tilts in the other direction.

She barely catches her balance, wobbles drunkenly. 'Wrong ... Something's ... I... Door ... got to...'

She takes a step toward the door and the room tilts again. She forces another and the room goes out. She feels herself stumble in a dreamlike fugue, barely feels any pain when her knees bang to the floor. She doesn't know she's falling forward, doesn't feel–

xx

Gibbs and DiNozzo return to the car and get in. All the people in the places they'd visited where Ventura had been seen agreed on one point: he was in town well after two thirty. He'd shopped, had gotten a haircut, had bowled two games with friends and then had a meal in the Continental Diner.

"Not in much of a hurry to get home," Gibbs muses.

"The missus said he thought he was getting an extra-hot meal when he got in," DiNozzo counters.

"None of this makes sense."

"Ziva found Keitt had a Life Insurance policy for $20,000," Tony reminds him. "Darla's the beneficiary."

"But that was the only one."

"And it's hardly worth it when together they pull in close to ninety grand."

Gibbs puts the car in gear and his cell phone rings. Driving one-handed, he pulls it out. DiNozzo's relieved the call came now rather than when they're back on that hill. "Yeah, Gibbs."

/Ziva. I am looking over Commander Ventura's credit card purchases from three months ago and found something unusual. While he was stocking up on all the building supplies, he also ordered 775 square feet of quarter-inch thick plastic./

Gibbs snaps the phone shut, tosses it on DiNozzo's lap and presses hard on the accelerator. The engine roars and DiNozzo clutches the door as the car launches toward the road back to the hill.

"What is it?" DiNozzo demands when he gets the belt secured against G-forces that left half his blood back at that far curb.

"Get Palmer on the speaker."

All of their phones have the same speed dial codes for this reason. DiNozzo grabs the discarded phone from the seat between them, activates it and the speaker buzzes and buzzes and buzzes. "She's not picking up," he reports unnecessarily.

Gibbs stomps on the accelerator, tires shriek and G-forces slam the men backward into their seats.


	9. Breathless

Chapter Nine  
Breathless

Tires shrieking, Gibbs' car leaves the road several times atop low hillocks. Turns are taken with stomach-wrenching force. Tony, feet planted hard into the foot well, grips the armrest with one hand, the frame of the glove compartment with the other and wishes for two more hands. Gibbs holds the pedal hard to the floor, the car rockets upward along the twisting road. Several times the guard rail threatens to come into the car with them but Gibbs never eases his pressure on the accelerator.

Frightened as he is, DiNozzo dares not break Gibbs' concentration. He clings tightly to the door and glove frame, buffeted side to side with every multi-G turn. Finally they're at the hillside bungalow and, even against belt and shoulder strap, he has to brace with extended arms to prevent being slammed into the glove compartment or sliced in three by the straps as Gibbs fights the car to a halt.

They're out and charge up the embankment to the blue and white house, DiNozzo to the right side, Gibbs to the front door. DiNozzo hears Gibbs pound on the door as he looks in the living room side window but sees no one. He rushes to the bedroom window and what he sees chills his rushing blood. "_BOSS_!"

x

He doesn't wait, pries at the window with strength enhanced by adrenaline and pounding heart. It's locked. Gibbs joins him and sees Darla Ventura slumped half off the bed and Michelle Palmer face down on the floor near the door. DiNozzo hefts a large rock, hurtles the missile at the glass.

It bounces off. "Damn!"

Gibbs draws and aims his Sig at the ceiling, fires. The bullet holes the window, a spider-web of cracks surround the hole, but the glass doesn't break. DiNozzo draws his own gun, adds his barrage to Gibbs' and they empty their weapons.

The glass is pockmarked with holes, it still doesn't shatter but this time it doesn't stand up to the rock, which Gibbs follows before DiNozzo can use the butt of his empty weapon to clear the shards from the frame. He holsters the gun in time to receive Darla Ventura's body.

He barely has a moment to lower her to the ground before receiving Michelle Palmer. He lays her down and turns back to Ventura. By the time he begins CPR he hears Gibbs land beside him.

x

For several tense minutes the men force breath into the motionless women, interspersing it with rhythmic chest compression. They don't allow themselves to think of lost teammates and friends or the determination not to lose another. Focus on technique, on rhythm, on breathing as two minutes become three - four - fi–

Michelle coughs, chokes for a moment and she's breathing.

Gibbs glances to his right where DiNozzo still works on Ventura. He takes a last moment, makes eye contact with Palmer. She's gasping but conscious. Then he's with DiNozzo, breathing for Ventura so the man can devote his effort to the regular compressions.

That damned room will not claim another victim!

xx

Darla Ventura, being older than Michelle, revives in another minute but neither woman is anxious to stand up. They just lie where they are, grateful to take in the crisp hillside air tang with woodland pine rather than the smothering bedroom air.

Gibbs, muscles aching and panting for breath as well, will see that both receive examinations from Ducky but for now he's not content to let either woman remain upon the ground. While DiNozzo helps Ventura to her feet Gibbs reaches down to Palmer, his manner making it clear he expects her to clasp his hand. He boosts her to her feet.

"When will I stop getting laid out on cases?" she asks.

"When you _start_ being the one who _does _the laying out."

His answer was sharper than she expected and she looks down. "Yes, sir."

He raps his knuckles on her forehead, surprising her into looking up. As far as he's concerned this doesn't violate their 'understanding', just gives him a new technique to use on her. She holds her fingers to her forehead, he doesn't care how she hurts. "Why did you two pass out?"

She turns to the shattered window, then back to him, lowers her hand to look up to him, nearly ten inches above her. A depression in the grass under her feet makes him even taller. "I'm not sure, sir. I felt tired, I thought it was from not sleeping last night. We were talking, I thought I dozed, woke up, she was passed out on the bed. Gas?"

"You don't know why Cheryl Keitt died in that room and you two almost did?"

She tries to quickly work out the reason but finally has to admit "No, sir."

"Well, then, Special Agent..."

"Yes, sir?"

He looms over her, she must crane her neck to look up and his shout seems to echo through the hill. "GET IN THERE AND FIND OUT!"

She'd retreated a step, cowered down, hunched inward at the first of the explosive command. "Y-y-yes, sir."

x

She doesn't quite run to the front door - he'd thought she might leap through the window - but when she's gone DiNozzo and Ventura are beside him.

"A little hard on her, boss? She almost died."

He turns to the man, nearly none-to-nose, eyes hard as diamonds. "If I'd almost died, I'd tear this house to the bedrock to find out _why_. Maybe this'll piss her off enough so she'll think better in the future." He turns, takes a step after the young agent.

"Wanna really piss her off? Let her know she was brought out second."

Gibbs turns and the glare he gives the younger man says it all: their charges, then themselves. But– "If she doesn't have that door open when we get around front, you'll see pissed off."

"Agent Gibbs?" He turns to Darla. "Are all NCIS agents merciless bastards?"

"No," he turns to follow Palmer. "Just me."

x

Michelle Palmer is standing in the bedroom when the three catch up with her. She looks upward at the multitude of bullet holes in the ceiling, then to the vacant window. "Shatterproof glass?"

"You tell us," Gibbs directs.

She examines the pieces, not shards, that litter the floor. "Not shatterproof, 'unbreakable'." She slowly walks the room, inspecting the walls. She looks back to him. "Cheryl Keitt was suffocated?" He gives her nothing. "There are two types of suffocating gasses, those that overwhelm oxygen by driving the percentage of total volume from 21 down to, say, 10 or even less - and those that replace oxygen." She stalks up to him. "Give me your knife."

"You forget Rule 9?"

"I'd rather use yours." If he can be rude after her nearly dying, she can be rude in figuring out how.

Without comment he opens and hands her his knife. She takes it to the right wall, wedges it between two wood panels, forces it behind the left one and glances back to Ventura. "Sorry."

She gets the left wooden panel pried out far enough that she can slip her fingers under it and pull. She can't move it more than half an inch. Bracing her knee on the wall, she pries harder, but it gradually comes back into place, trapping her fingers. She won't give in, pulls harder. "You know, a gentleman would _help_!"

"DiNozzo. Be a gentleman."

"Right, boss."

"You only had to ask," Gibbs tells her.

x

Together DiNozzo and Palmer pry at the panel and pull mightily. With a loud 'crack' it gives way and falls to the floor.

Under horizontal lines of glue, the quarter-inch thick plastic forms a smooth barrier.

"Seven hundred seventy five square feet," Gibbs tells them, "is enough to enclose the room on all six sides."

"I read Jimmy's medical books," Michelle says, rubbing her sore fingers. "Sea level air is twenty-one percent oxygen. Bring the oxygen in the room from twenty-one percent down toward ten," Michelle tries to recall the progressive order, "lethargy, confusion, disorientation, loss of consciousness, coma ... and death."

"What the hell kind of insulation is that?" Darla is appalled by her husband's short-sightedness.

"Mrs. Ventura–" Tony tries.

"I mean, _plastic _is _not_ an insulator," she snaps, cornering DiNozzo, the closest agent. "This room gets cold sometimes at night; we have to sleep under a comforter or thick blanket. He was supposed to insulate the room with fiberglass, not _plastic_."

x

While she's talking, Gibbs beckons Palmer out of the room, leads her to the kitchen before he turns. "We're taking her back to Washington." Michelle only nods. "I want you to stay with her at Headquarters, pull every bit of information you can."

"Yes, sir."

"Pretty soon it's going to sink in that the plastic's not insulation and that _Keitt _wasn't the intended victim."

A high, keening cry cuts through the house, collapses into an insensate wail.

"I think it just did."

x

Gibbs restrains a sigh as the noise transmutes into wild sobbing. "This still doesn't explain why he was speeding. A Navy Commander is taught to handle stress better. He missed his wife, got his sister-in-law, but after all this planning he panics?"

"It doesn't sound right."

He starts to step past her.

"Sir?" He halts. "Before then–" She swallows, tries again. "Special Agent Gibbs, I'd like to thank you. You saved my li–" Gibbs' hard glare makes her take a step back.

"I have only one word to say to you, Palmer." His words cut into her like a chisel.

"Sir?"

"_Don't_!"

"Sir?"

"Last fall I had to go to funerals and memorials for nine agents, since then there've been four more. Some of them were very good friends. _Don't make me go to yours_!"

He stalks away toward the maelstrom in the bedroom.

Left behind, Michelle stares after him. But then she smiles, thinking of her father, another man who could never express his feelings in 'traditional' ways. He would always be the strong one. Caring and affection were women's emotions … but she could see them in him even through the hardness.

"Love you too, sir," she whispers.

xx

Back in the bedroom, Gibbs shuts out the sobbing woman seated upon the bed where Tony does his best to console her without touching her. That's Rule 35, 'Never touch a crying woman.' What looks like consoling now can look like an opportunity for inappropriate touch later, and that had already nearly taken down Special Agent Tomlinson two years ago.

Stepping over to the shattered window, he pulls his spare set of latex gloves from his jacket pocket, puts them on and very carefully takes hold of the recessed handhold in the wood, cautious not to smear the already lifted prints. He pulls up, tugs, yanks, heaves.

Abby had said there were prints that were nothing but useless black ovals and the reason's clear now, at least as a working theory. Cheryl Keitt had tried to open this window, probably to relieve stuffiness in the room. Failing to get it open, believing she was having an asthma attack, she took her Primatine, laid down expecting it to work - and died.

Gibbs inspects the window frame carefully and finds it sealed all about with what appears to be clear varnish. Opening his knife, he slices a measure of it from the wood.

xxx

Tim McGee ascends the stairs from the B&B's dining room where he'd spent a half hour chatting with other guests and enters his room to find Siobhan buttoning her red blouse. "Hi, darling."

She pulls her long red hair from under the material to settle past her shoulders but doesn't finish buttoning the blouse beyond half way. Instead she crosses the room and gives him a loving kiss. They take their time before either has anything to say. When he comes up for air more than two minutes later he notices that, though the light is fading from the easterly facing windows, she's changed her clothes to red blouse and blue skirt. He anticipates her answer to his question will be a drive into the nearby village. "What would you like to do?"

"I thought we might play."

That, coupled with the tone of seductive anticipation she gives the last word, has a very definite appeal. He glances over her shoulder to the large bed before meeting her emerald eyes. "Play?" he asks with a grin.

Arms laced about his neck, she nods. "Cards."

This isn't the answer he'd expected. "Cards."

"Uh huh." Her gaze guides his to the table set off-sides to the curtained window. It's been cleared, there's a stack of playing cards set in the middle and chairs on either side. She releases him, goes to the right side, sits down and picks up the deck.

He supposes, as he sits down opposite her, that with mornings and evenings devoted less to sightseeing than to amorous re-acquaintance, she may be tired. He certainly has no problem, though this is the first time he's ever known her to be interested in card games. He puts it down to one of the many discoveries that marriage will entail.

x

"What would you like to play?"

"War," she replies, starting to deal out the deck.

"War?" This is a bit surprising. "I thought you were a pacifist."

She smiles, continuing to deal. "This is a very special kind of war. _My _rules."

"Really?"

"_Really_." She slows down the dealing, her smile and movements more sensual.

Tim is starting to get the sense that this won't be the average game. "And what are they?"

"Single card per hand … but the winner gets to remove a piece of the loser's clothing."

He smiles. "I think I'm going to like these rules."

"I thought you would." She finishes dealing, but before he can pick up his half of the deck she covers his hand with hers. "Oh, I almost forgot." This he doesn't believe. "As consolation for losing a hand, after removing that piece the winner has to pleasure the loser along any part of the body exposed for no less than twenty times the number of seconds on the winning card."

"This sounds like _fun_." A win with a 3, unlikely but possible, will earn a full minute of amorous attention. A ten or face card will be well over three minutes. This is likely to be a very long game.

She withdraws her hand, her fingers sliding slowly along the back of his. He picks up his deck and evaluates his prospects."Oh, and one more thing."

He looks up. "Yes?"

"If an _Ace _is played, the loser has to do anything the winner wants."

"Anything?"

"Ab - so - lute - ly ... any - thing."

Intrigued by these rules, he examines his cards, though the order can't be changed. "Shav?"

Her eyes shine with delight. "Yes, a ghrá?" Her voice is extra melodious and so sensual he can barely hold the cards.

"Well, 'my love', you didn't shuffle this deck very well. It seems that, while I have one of the Jacks, I have two of the Queens, threeof the Kings," he checks the deck again, "and _all _of the Aces."

"Yeahhhhh."

xxx

Five thousand miles west and five hours back on the clock, late lunch on the return trip through Maryland to Washington is take-out from a highway diner. The food is second-rate, a pleasant surprise because DiNozzo's opinion was that the venue was that it was a little less than fourth. Their food does resemble their orders and tastes reasonably like them, so they have to concede the trip was tolerable.

In deference to Ventura the trek isn't made at warp seven. Nonetheless, they reach the non-descript Safe House where SA Marie Watson is waiting in an especially short time.

The woman hadn't cared much for being left behind for several hours, on guard duty for no one, but Gibbs is Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge so she can say nothing. She's spent the time napping, however, and being on the clock made the sleep more satisfying.

Of course she'd kept on the hair trigger a Federal Agent learns to use as an alternative to dying, so she was alert when she heard the crunch of feet on white gravel and on her feet when the front door opened.

Gibbs, following a terse briefing that excludes their near-death drama, directs Darla Ventura to the front room table.

He hadn't been able to interview her in the car, now he can give her his full attention. She's eaten and has had a chance to digest both the shocking truth and a decent meal, so he decides he's been extraordinarily patient for long enough. "Have you any idea why your husband would want you dead?"

"No," she declares morosely, "I can't even believe this is really happening."

x

While they speak, Watson takes DiNozzo and Palmer to the far corner where they can observe the interview and she may report on her investigation. In Ventura's absence, Watson had gone through the woman's hastily packed luggage. She ignores the look Michelle gives her, knowing the petite agent is thinking about the warrantless search. This isn't collecting evidence on a suspect, this is gathering Intel. She keeps her voice low.

"I looked through her papers, read her journal, pretty much reviewed everything I could get hold of. Now I don't have Ducky's insights into psychological autopsies, he could probably find things I can't, but I found nothing to lead me to think she knew anything might be wrong in their marriage. She has three letters from Commander Ventura, and they're pretty much of the 'miss you, can't wait to see you' variety. He _was_ quite specific about the date, though. Each of the letters specifies the nineteenth."

"Sounds like he was making sure he'd have the time to get that room ready," DiNozzo whispers.

"But it got the wrong victim," Michelle concludes.

"Do you suppose she might have figured out he killed the sister, went out and cut his brake line?" Watson asks.

"No," DiNozzo is certain of this. "She was clueless. You should've seen her reaction when we found the room was encased in plastic. She had no idea her loving hubby was building a death trap for her."

"Then what do you suppose happened?" Michelle asks. "I mean, if he set the trap to kill her, then who killed him?"


	10. Burnt Out

Chapter Ten  
Burnt Out

Ducky Mallard and Jimmy Palmer have the charred, blackened husk of Commander Robert Ventura laid out on the middle silver autopsy table. It has taken to this point to complete a thorough though inconclusive autopsy on Cheryl Keitt. Though they've conducted an exhaustive series of examinations from brain to bowels, they hadn't found any cause for the woman's death. Their only option is to divert attentions to a fresh case while their findings - or lack of such - percolate in their minds while they wait for the result of tests which will take their overtaxed colleague upstairs even more time to complete.

In the meantime, they hope this victim will have a more straightforward reason for his condition.

The carbonized remnants of clothing were very carefully removed, small fragment by smaller fragment. It had been a slow, laborious process because much of the charred material is adhered to flesh, every bit of which must be carefully preserved. No one can know where an essential clue will be found, so everything must be painstakingly examined in its turn.

The garments and such pieces of flesh as could not be kept to the body proper have been preserved in air-tight canisters. Much of the fire's nature can be learned from analyzing such debris.

Now they're left with the corpse itself.

Robert Ventura has lost much of his mass and all of his moisture. One arm, half of the other and both lower legs are gone while blackened skin and flesh have molded themselves to bones and there is too much ash to identify, whether human, clothing or some unknown contributor that may lead the case in a new direction.

Making the 'Y' cut will be a cautious endeavor. While far from a cremation, the fire has radically changed the body. A careless move may well result in the loss of what evidence they'd try to uncover.

xx

Darla Ventura has been moved into Headquarters and Marie Watson joins Louisa Sportelli in a rotating Protective Watch over her in between times when Gibbs will try to 'gently and subtly' pry - or wrench - information from her. He still hopes some reason may be gleaned for setting this complex and tragic plan into motion, a plan in which the intended victim is alive but the murderer, and an apparently innocent woman, are dead.

When Gibbs, Tony and Michelle enter the Autopsy suite, at first neither Examiner glances up from the charred body of Robert Ventura laid out upon the middle table between them. Jimmy is the first to glance up and see the trio.

"Hi," he calls informally. Neither arriving man believes himself particularly included in the greeting.

Ducky turns, mildly surprised to have been so absorbed that he'd failed to notice the electronic door opening and closing. Of course, the air conditioner is on full power to counter the stench of burnt flesh, but still…. "Ah, you're just in time."

"Time for what?" Gibbs asks.

"There seems to have been an impact of considerable force to the center of the Commander's forehead."

They can see where the black, overcooked flesh, desiccated to a tight mask about the skull, indicates a significant horizontal indentation. "Steering wheel?" Gibbs asks.

"Doubtful, as you will soon note, though I suspect the impacts involved in the rolling crash may well have damaged it severely. I don't recall," he admits. "Abby will, of course, be able to confirm or refute this. The good Commander did indeed suffer extensive injuries in the rolling crash down that hill." He recalls that the car, or what was left of the crumpled hulk, had suffered as badly as its driver.

Both of the corpse's legs are burnt away, right above the knee, and the right arm is gone while the left is half-consumed, gone almost to the elbow. The hairless head is little more than a hood of tight black flesh and the face a charred mask.

Ventura's breastplate has been removed, and the chest is no different than what Gibbs has seen from hundreds of completed autopsies, except for the seared, blackened, desiccated nature of _these _organs. "Yes," Ducky says, noting their gaze, "in a death by fire it is not uncommon for the inner organs to be less damaged, sometimes apparently hardly touched, but Commander Ventura was burnt out through and through.

"You'll find this interesting, however." He holds up the excised breastplate. Normally Ducky separates the ribs in a line down the left and right sides, leaving them attached en bloc to the sternum, but the cuts are quite clean and linier. These ribs, however, have been separated in an arc, the uppermost bones short, then lengthening to a maximum of about two feet before beginning to shorten. Further, these are broken away rather than smoothly cut.

"Steering wheel?" Gibbs speculates.

"So it does seem. How fast was the Commander driving before he went off the road?"

"We figure 49, then out nearly 80 feet before hitting the first bit of ground and starting to roll."

"It takes considerably more force to snap ribs so cleanly," Ducky reminds them. "They grew brittle in the fire, but before then?"

"There was damage down the slope, the car got banged up rolling end over end."

"If the car had gone off the mountain for one titanic front-end impact down to where it was found some four hundred feet distant, I could account for this. Makes it interesting, doesn't it?"

x

Michelle steps around the body to stand beside Jimmy so she can see past Ducky's hands. As the older man works, cautiously listing each organ in turn and the extent of damage done to it by impacts and fire, Jimmy leans closer to ask his wife quietly. "So, how was your trip?"

Staring straight ahead, she says "Breathless," and glances up at Gibbs, almost daring him to say something.

Gibbs won't get between a married couple. If she wants to keep secrets, especially after the revelations made following the Mary Whitney 'human bomb' case and the aftermath of keeping the secret of what had happened when she and McGee were captured by Dennis Whitney's terrorist cell, that's their business.

If any more pieces of their relationship are to be picked up, that's their issue too.

"What more did you find?" he asks instead of the man beside him.

"Not much more at this point." Ducky looks over the corpse as a whole. "You know, this reminds me of an incident that happened one day in Borneo, when I was attached–"

"That's a bit of a new look I saw for Ziva earlier," Jimmy observes to Tony, mostly to head off one of the man's lengthy digressions while having completely missed his wife's evasion.

"Yeah," Tony's agreement is even more enthusiastic, if only to help his partner out as well as to lead into a more interesting digression. He enjoys Ducky's bemused expression at being cut off, and is well ready to get into the fun. "Black leather cat suit, she has the whole Emma Peel thing going for her."

"Emma Peel?" Jimmy's quite bewildered.

"Avengers? Diana Rigg?" He's not getting anywhere. "BBC? 1960's?"

"Ah." Jimmy considers it. "Aren't you dating yourself?"

"Lately no one else will," Gibbs quips.

"Heh heh."

x

"Did you know, Tony," Ducky asks broadly, always a bad sign; he's been redirected, not derailed, "that the derivation of the character's name 'Emma Peel' comes from the popular British slang for male attraction or 'M-Appeal?"

"No, I didn't," DiNozzo admits.

Jimmy's smile is more a smirk; he hadn't liked being caught out of the loop. "I guess your knowledge doesn't completely cover sexy iconic women."

"I guess not. Still, it's more Ducky's time - and line."

"True," Ducky grants. "Though, if the producers had made Ms. Rigg's character Scottish, she would have had more D-Appeal."

Time to rein this in. "Duck?"

"Hm, yes Jethro?"

"The body?"

"Oh, an excellent body, I'm sure you must recall. I understand the Avengers were quite popular in–"

"OUR bodies!"

He looks to himself and then the other men, pointedly excluding Jimmy. "I very much doubt _we_ three would have much 'F-Appeal' as it were," he says, giving Michelle a wink.

"Keitt and Ventura!"

Ducky shakes his head, giving up the game. "Jethro, speaking as your doctor, after everything that's happened lately, you really must cultivate a sense of the ridiculous."

"Cultivate it? I live with it every day."

"I thrive on it," DiNozzo points out.

"I know," Gibbs glares at his risk-taking subordinate and then returns to Ducky. "Get back to it."

"Gladly." Ducky points to the charred and brittle husk of what was once Robert Ventura. "There's not as much as I should like to discover on or in our friend," he says, passing a hand over the blackened corpse. "The fire has done an excellent job. The body is, as you see, half cremated."

The inferno had raged for about three hours, and the charred man's legs are gone below the left knee and the right arm is also missing, the left arm below the elbow and desiccation and smoking have reduced the flesh to a shrunken mass wrapped tightly about the bones.

"There is too little of the body remaining to give an easy Cause of Death. I've requested the Commander's medical records yesterday, but I fear it'll be some time before they arrive."

x

"What _can _you tell us?" Gibbs presses.

"Definitively, very little." He leads Gibbs and DiNozzo across the room to where a series of panels illuminate rows of X-ray exposures, leaving the Palmers behind. "Commander Ventura suffered fractures of the skull, left upper arm, your guess as to what the right arm had to endure; most of the ribs are broken by what had to have been a titanic impact. It was unnecessary, as you saw, to cut them to reach the thoracic cavity. There's far too little of the legs remaining to determine how much trauma he suffered there."

"He was belted in," Tony recalls. "How'd he get so many breaks?"

"He may well have been belted and strapped in," Ducky admits, "we have only the indication of the latch inserted into the locking mechanism, since the straps themselves were burned away. Yet did you know that in a recent poll of drivers in Wisconsin, almost 1.1 percent admitted to have secured the belt behind them rather than listening to the automatic warning coming from their dashboards? Furthermore, if one percent admitted it, I suspect the number of actual cases to be somewhat higher."

Gibbs doesn't like this. "Navy man is going to be more cautious. It's drummed into you to be careful." He thinks again of the possibility, especially in light of the damage to the ribs against the steering wheel, but his gut kicks it back up again. He turns to the pair behind him. "Palmer."

"Yes?" It's an unconscious male and female duet, much to Ducky's amusement, but Gibbs' glare makes clear which one he'd meant.

"Get back up and run Ventura's computer."

"Yes, sir."

"DiNozzo–" is as far as he gets when his cell phone rings. He pulls it out, not pleased to read 'Shepherd' on the small screen. Her cell phone is 'Jenny'.

xxx

After a detailed report to NCIS' Director on the many convolutions of this case, Gibbs and Tony enter the bullpen and find not only Michelle and Ziva at their desks but Abby pacing the bullpen. She's wearing an orange NCIS jumpsuit considerably smudged with black soot over the too-attention-grabbing tee shirt he'd seen her in earlier. He considers her wise for being so discreet, as he's not in the mood for anything other than strict business and DiNozzo doesn't need any more inspirations.

Michelle, talking on her telephone, glances at them and says rapidly into the handset: "They're back. Oh. Okay. Sorry. Thank you, I really owe you. Bye now." She hangs up.

Abby turns back from a rapid circuit. "Gibbs, I found–" His upraised hand cuts her short as he addresses Palmer.

"Who was that?" Abby's about to speak, but he raises a hand once again. Halting in fractured word, her expression conveys her opinion of the double interruption. Gibbs would normally hear Abby out if not for Palmer's odd behavior. He hopes the Palmer downstairs isn't rubbing off on her.

x

"Sir," Michelle points to her screen, "Commander Ventura has been doing a lot of on-line research. His hard drive has already been mirrored last evening by Cyber Crimes to Special Agent McGee's computer, and he has a hidden, password protected directory where he's been storing details on changing his identity. There are websites, books referenced, checklists of things to do like changing Social Security numbers, birth, school, education and employment records; faking tax returns and also things like Mexican plastic surgeons, all sorts of things."

Gibbs wonders how many more words she can cram into a single breath, but there's a point more significant than good lungs, though she's tried to use those lungs to blow past now two important things. He's not going to let her get away with either of them. "On a hidden, password protected directory?"

"Yes sir."

"How'd you find it?" The law, not computers, is Palmer's forté - or has she been hiding an aptitude?

"Well, I… sir… I… I didn't."

"Then who _did_? Who were you on the phone with?" She'd gotten off quickly enough when they walked in.

"Sir, I…."

He raises a finger to halt her and his voice is calm enough to convey deep danger. "Who?"

It takes a moment for her to answer, her wide eyes drowning in apprehension. "Special Agent McGee … sir."

DiNozzo picks up before Gibbs can completely recover from his surprise. "You called Zorba McGeek on his honeymoon?"

"I–"

"The man is on Leave," Gibbs reminds her, surprised he has to.

"Sir, I couldn't find _anything _on Ventura's computer, nothing at all to account for anything he was doing and I knew something had to be somewhere, but I couldn't find it–"

"So you phoned McTron," Tony relishes this, "in _Ireland_, on his _honeymoon_, to do his Harry Potter thingy for you?"

She tries to ignore both him and his mixed metaphor and looks instead up into Gibbs' eyes. "Sir, I–"

Gibbs checks his watch, tacks on five hours to the early evening and doesn't want to imagine what Palmer must have interrupted. "Agent Palmer, just what were you thinking?"

"Errr … getting the case solved?"

"And you couldn't contact Cyber Crime?"

"Sir, I did, sir. They're backed up on a case for Supervisory Special Agent Higgins and his team. They said they can get to it in the morning."

"So you took it upon yourself, by yourself, with no word from me, to call McGee, in Ireland, to solve it?"

She looks down, then back up, determined not to break. "Yes, sir."

"Good girl," he tells her with a grin, continues on to his desk and hears her release tightly held breath. "Don't do it again."

Tony, however, just can't let it go and addresses the bullpen as a whole. "Does anyone find it a little bit scary that McGee can take over an NCIS computer with his laptop in Ireland?"

"No, DiNozzo," Gibbs retorts as he sits down. "What's scary is that he's accomplished more from 5,000 miles away than you have right here."

x

"_Gibbs_!" Abby sounds like she'll rupture something if she doesn't get to report.

"Sorry, Abby, what've you got?" She's brought the odor of the burnt-out wreck upstairs with her but he won't mention that.

"Major Mass Spec had a field day with the samples you sent me, and I just had to do down to double-check his findings. I mean, I'm not doubting him, he's never wrong, it's just that–"

"Abs, it's late." Dinner is being served in the café, never a pleasant prospect, and it's too late to consider take-out from the city.

"Oh, yeah, you're gonna love this," Abby steps over to the plasma screen between Tony's desk and McGee's Mardi Gras float, retrieves the remote control and rejoins them. Ziva and Michelle leave their desks for better vantages.

Abby activates the screen and an image of Ventura's burnt-out wreck in the Evidence garage appears. It faces the overhead camera; hood, trunk and all door that can open are so. "I identified the source of the fire. It wasn't the engine, it wasn't the fuel line and it wasn't the gas tank."

"What was it?" Gibbs asks, affection alone allowing him to keep it a calm question.

"The _driver's seat_," she announces, relishing the revelation as she changes the view to a close image of the spot. "Fire pattern traces the direction of fire back to the source, which was under his seat. He had a really hot butt." She smiles at him and even his best glare fails to wipe it away.

"So he set himself on fire?" Tony doesn't like the scenario.

"Nope. The fire started directly under him." She leaves the rest of the dramatic revelation unsaid as an exercise for the class.

"The fire burnt for three hours," DiNozzo remembers the burnt out bottom of the hill. While the fire had extended slightly beyond the arbitrary 'border', everything within a radius of fifty feet around the car had been obliterated.

"I also found accelerants, and a whopping amount of it."

"What kind of accelerant?"

"Not accelerant, accelerants. Major Mass Spec had a field day pulling up gasoline, kerosene, lighter fluid, charcoal fluid, rubbing alcohol and a gazillion other kinds. The wood in the front and back seats was soaked in it, so were the seats, upholstery, even the roof. He must've wanted the body to be ashes and that car to melt into a puddle of steel goo. Pity it doesn't work that way."

x

"How'd this happen?" Gibbs asks, not liking the developing scenario.

"How does a dead man drive?" she asks instead.

"Better than Palmer looking for a Crime Scene," Tony quips and enjoys Michelle's glare.

"Rhetorical question. He drives with this." From the pocket of the sooty orange coveralls she pulls, between her thumb and forefinger, a blue plastic screw-on cap. "Actually, with one just like it, not with this particular one or type, this is just an illustration.

"Abby." Gibbs has been here long enough today and the prospect of reexamining the case grows more unpleasant as the likelihood increases. The ID change trail in that hidden computer directory is becoming more unpleasantly clear.

"Look." Abby enlarges the picture as the camera zooms in on the exposed engine, enlarges further until it focuses on the carburetor. "See it?"

"No," Tony answers for them. All they see is blackened, half-melted metal.

"It took Major Mass Spec to find it" she admits with a broad smile. "I took scrapings of different parts of the engine, and found melted plastic coating the throttle. I think a plastic bottle cap, sort of like this one but give me time to pin it down as to size, was used to hold it open."

Gibbs thinks back to the death strip on the side of the hill, and what Ziva had relayed about the car's speed. It'd gone off the cliff, with no skid or brake marks on the road, at 49 miles per hour. Abby can calculate - later - how big the cap had been.

"He had the car in neutral," he concludes, "opened the hood, put in a plastic bottle cap to hold the throttle open, put the car in drive and it drove down the road and off the cliff. He rigged something to set fire to the car, starting at the driver seat."

"You got it."

Tony's question is among the most significant. "So whose body is Ducky working on?"


	11. Slater

Chapter Eleven  
Slater

Gibbs turns away, goes back to his desk and sits down. Tony, Ziva, Michelle and Abby, left behind, watch as he sits in silence for several moments. They exchange wondering glances, uncertain what to make of this. Impatient Gibbs is an old friend, angry Gibbs, though familiar, is to be avoided, but pensive Gibbs is a stranger.

They step to his desk, Tony in the center with Ziva and Michelle on either side and Abby behind him. "Boss?"

"What, DiNozzo?" He sounds worse than pensive.

"You okay?"

"Am I getting old?" The four exchange even more uncomfortable glances, uncertain how to answer this. "I mean, first Langley concocts an elaborate scheme to trade in his wife on a new model," he glances at Abby, thinking of her new if temporary houseguest, "and to frame Samantha Sky for the murder. Now Ventura has an even more elaborate murder scheme?" He sighs. "Am I the only one who remembers when 'until death do us part' meant anything?"

Tony, not about to raise the irony of the man's three divorces, feels he's got to get Impatient Gibbs back. "Maybe we'd better warn Siobhan before McNally comes up with a plot for his next book?"

Abby, Michelle and Ziva exchange significant glances and Tony is staggered by the triple head-strike. Gibbs, who had been about to give his own wake-up call, admires the women's synchronization.

"Okay," he declares, revitalized, "David, I want to know who the _hell's_ on Ducky's table. Call that Sheriff Jung, have him look for any Missing Persons. DiNozzo, how'd Ventura get out of the area without a car? Does he have an accomplice, a girlfriend, hell, a _boy_friend? Palmer, Alan Slater's the beneficiary of Ventura's Will so he's probably the new Ventura. Get on that hidden directory, find out what he's done and where he's gone, then get a warrant for his financial records _and_ Slater's based on the ID change information. Abby, pull out every Forensic rabbit you've got. I also want a BOLO on both those names. The four of you, find him and _no, I don't want to wait for the warrant_. I'll be with Ducky." He's gone in seconds, the quartet gratified as they proceed to their assignments.

x

"Palmer!" When Michelle turns, almost to her desk and comes up on her toes to track the unexpected summons over the cubical partitions, Gibbs is standing by the elevator. She hurries to follow, uncertain why he'd changed his mind but not about to delay him, knowing he probably won't wait anyway. When she reaches him he pushes the elevator button. The door opens and he leads her aboard.

When the doors meet he throws the Emergency Stop switch. The lights dim and change to blue and he steps in front of her, compelling her to look high up to his face. "Wanna tell me what that was about earlier?"

She looks up into his grim eyes, uncertain. She's already been reprimanded about calling Ireland and can't imagine Gibbs chastising her twice for the same offense. "Sir?"

"'Breathless'?"

That was how she'd evaded Jimmy's question earlier about how her trip to the hills had gone, how she'd avoided saying she'd almost died of suffocation.

"I don't want him worrying about me."

"He's your husband."

"He worries about me whenever I go out. I could be shot, I could be–"

"You kept what happened to you when Klein and her people captured you. You remember what happened when you finally came clean and told him. Didn't you learn from that lesson?" She tries for a stubborn mask, but can't hold it. "Take some advice from someone who's done it four times: Marriage, to last, is about communication."

"_You_? You who have been divorced three times? You, who never communicates _anything_ from the heart? _You _say this?"

He slaps the switch, the lights come back on and the car resumes its descent. "Why do you think I'm divorced?"

On the Autopsy level, Gibbs passes through the sliding doors. Michelle hadn't been invited and so returns to Operations on 3. She doesn't want to face Jimmy now, having too much to think about.

None of it is pleasant.

x

"What did you find?" Gibbs asks as he approaches the two men flanking the burnt-out corpse.

"Not much more than a few minutes ago," Ducky says, glancing back over his shoulder at the approaching man. Both he and Jimmy have their faces partially covered by blue surgical masks to ward off the odor of the charred corpse. "Commander Ventura–"

"John Doe," Gibbs corrects, attaining their full attentions.

Ducky pulls off his mask. "I beg your pardon?"

"Ventura's still alive. Abby found out this guy's a substitute. We're working on finding out who he is and tracing Ventura's new identity. We think he's now 'Alan Slater'."

"Indeed?" he doesn't take the surprise well. "Abby knew? How long have you known?"

"Not long."

"Your sense of priority leaves much to be desired."

"Abby says he," he indicates the burnt out body, "was dead before he went over the cliff and Ventura set the car on fire. Any way of figuring out who this is?"

Ducky decides not to indulge in the three minutes of venting he feels entitled to, knowing it'll be useless when Gibbs is in this mood.

"Well, there's dental records, or we can try to get a DNA trace from inside the pelvic bone, it's the best protected source, bearing in mind that fire frequently destroys DNA. Both of these can confirm identity _when you have an ID for him_. As to that, _I suggest you ask Abby_."

"Something wrong, Duck?"

"Oh no, I enjoy doing an autopsy on previously dead bodies to determine Cause of Death for Navy Commanders."

"Good. We need both a Cause and Time on John Doe here, and whatever you can find as an ID. If you can get any usable DNA, how long do you think it'll take to get a match?"

"Abby might get a trace in under a day. Getting a match, who can say?" Certainly he won't; the answer will not serve the cause of peace.

"Fast as you can, Duck." He departs as quickly as he came, and the two Examiners doubt he would stop if either of them called him.

When the doors slide shut, Ducky sighs and turns back to Jimmy. "Well, Mister Palmer, let's start over."

Jimmy decides the wisest thing he can say is nothing.

"We'll start with excising a segment of the pelvis. That should provide us with a usable sample. As to the rest," he recalls having skipped dinner and glances at the clock on the right wall. "Tomorrow."

xxx

Unbeknownst to the hard pressed pair in the sub-basement, upstairs Gibbs has made a similar decision. Faced with the frequent choice of holding his people overnight to pursue this new direction or approaching the questions with fresh minds at 0700, he orders everything in the search that can be set on automatic done so and then dismisses his team. Tony and Ziva waste not a moment in accepting.

Michelle, not ready to face Jimmy yet, has a preferred alternative to going home. Abby, working 20 straight hours without a break - and using 9 large containers of 'Caf-Pow!' since 0700, had declared herself finished for the day when Gibbs had gone down to Autopsy. She'd invited Michelle to meet her upstairs on 4 in Chaplain O'Mallory's - rather, McGee's - office.

When Palmer enters the small office, which is little more than eight feet wide and eighteen deep, she sees Abby has added to the decorating they'd done the other evening. If Tim McGee's desk downstairs looks like a Mardi Gras or parade float, this room resembles the Reviewing Stand at the Tournament of Roses.

"Didn't Special Agent Gibbs tell you to leave her enough room to open the door?"

"There's room." Abby turns to the portal as Michelle closes it. "Sort of."

Michelle stands still, taking in the long, thin room, feeling slightly stunned. Siobhan had focused on austerity in her lack of decoration, so the room features a desk and executive chair that face the far wall, a comfortable seven foot long couch along the right wall, a set of beige filing cabinets along the left wall and nothing else. There are no pictures, only a small radio by the telephone and a crucifix on the wall over the desk; nothing to give any visitor the impression that the priest is in any way distracted from him or her.

That's how the room used to look.

x

Now streamers of brightly colored, intertwined ribbon in seemingly more colors than a rainbow can manage extend along each wall in layers of inverted arches and crisscross the room from corner to corner above their heads while silver and gold tinsel add their unnecessary highlights. Posters vie with wedding and reception pictures for space on the walls and a tremendous 'Congratulations' banner dominates the far wall above the desk, while ribbons and rosettes and stars and hearts and artistic flowers and bunting and streamers turn the room into a staggering kaleidoscope of color. Michelle knows that there's an order for an even more stunning variety of flowers to be delivered the day before the couple is due to return.

"Like it?" Abby asks.

'This was ground zero when Hallmark exploded,' she thinks. "I'm starting to understand why Special Agent Gibbs called a halt to decorating Tim's desk." She fears a bout of sensory overload and clings to the doorknob behind her, wondering if there's a graceful way to retreat and plead innocence when the couple returns. "I'm so sorry I let you talk me into picking this lock."

"I could've done it."

"I was afraid you'd scratch the cylinder. She's probably going to change the lock now anywa–" Her voice shuts off when she sees it and, crossing to the desk, she admits her eyes haven't deceived her.

If only they had.

Above Siobhan's desk hangs a brown crucifix of a type Michelle's never seen anywhere else. Christ's arms are not nailed to the cross bar but are held outward as though to embrace a beloved child. Abby has draped, over Christ's hands, the lacy blue leg garter the bride had worn. "Oh, now _that's_ just gonna piss her off."

"You're probably right," Abby admits, removing the sexy garment and setting it more discreetly upon the desktop. "It'd seemed funny at the time."

"Not as wild as how you got it."

o o

The St. Patrick's Day Wedding Reception had been held in a white, gold and crystal Catering Hall decorated with every conceivable traditional Irish accoutrement and the band had been 'traditional' Irish in the form of an electric keyboard to go with the more authentic guitar, flute, accordion, harp and drums, and every time one of the group spoke he or she sounded like they'd just come in from Erin. Reels, jigs, hornpipes and traditional ballads abounded, including one ballad sung in Gaelic that reduced the bride to tears she insisted later were of joy but Michelle hadn't been quite sure.

There was set and step dancing such as someone explained to her is often done at a Céilí and some you really can't do in a wedding gown. Perhaps this was why Siobhan had gone for the more modern 'trainless' gowns? Michelle had sat out some of the dancing because, looking at some of the dancers who did get up, she knew she couldn't possibly keep up with the traditional steps. Still, she'd never been to an Irish celebration and spirits were high in every moment.

Even Gibbs, to the amazement of all who knew him, had a grand time dancing with Jennifer - something Michelle had thought she'd have to pay good money to one day see.

At one point Sammy Sky led the orchestra in a high spirited rendition of 'Granuaile's Dance' that had many dancers on their feet, but midway through the music changed, sped up to several times its original pace and all the guests left the floor to form a tremendous 'Love Ring', leaving Tim and Siobhan alone as they seemingly flew about the dance floor, the music so enthusiastic it almost seemed Sky was going to leave the band behind. Michelle had stood with the other guests, clapping to the rhythm but her mouth hanging open in amazement at the pair, particularly her mild, unassuming partner who'd never again be able to hide behind a sedate image.

x

Just before the main course was served, more than midway through the ebullient evening, all the unmarried women were called before the dais and Siobhan stood, back to them, in the middle of the dance floor for the traditional over-the-shoulder toss of the white bridal bouquet. That tradition, which supposedly designates the next woman to wed, had actually come true after her and Jimmy's nuptials, when Siobhan had caught those flowers. The white bouquet arched to a rising riff and this time, at a cymbal climax, the lot fell upon Abby.

Then a heavily decorated throne had been set up in the center of the dance floor and Siobhan was seated upon it. Tim's job was to reach under her white gown and remove, from her right thigh, the blue garter. It should have been an easy task, the blonde harpist accompanying the effort, but considerable lascivious hilarity had ensued because Tim had taken such an inordinate amount of time 'searching' for the garment.

Then, to an accordion reel, the unmarried men had gathered, less to fulfill the same prediction than to vie for the opportunity to decorate Abby with the garter. Tony DiNozzo had taken a prominent position in the crowd of tuxedoed men and Abby had dreaded his success.

Ducky Mallard had also, at Jordan Hampton's urging, joined the throng but he stood well off to the right, determined not to participate in, and possibly be injured by, the mêlée of young suitors.

Tim had thrown the silken garment high to a fast keyboard riff. The garter completed its rise, arced downward - and diverted 40 degrees right to land upon Ducky's shoulder.

The guests had put it down to the light cloth's crossing the air conditioner's current and thought nothing about it. Michelle, at Abby's large table with Jimmy, Gibbs, Jenny, Sammy, Ziva, her date and Tony's, had been the image of innocence.

x

Abby had then been enthroned in the center chair, exceptionally pleased by the 'mysterious' incident, and Ducky had gone down on one knee before her. All was, from her point of view, going very nicely. Not only does she have great affection for the gentleman but she was utterly confident that he would be courteous about the custom. She'd had no such hopes about any of the losers.

Then the MC almost ruined things by declaring that the higher the garter was placed, the more years of wedded bliss the happy couple would enjoy.

She'd raised her white slippered foot, her face flushed, and Ducky had been prepared to be that perfect gentleman. But the band's drummer started a roll that increased in passion as Ducky's hands went higher and higher under Abby's dress. He hadn't touched her but it was quiet evident to all that under Abby's gown the garter was reaching quite high indeed. Abby's face was red as his hands slowly ascended, and her breath was held tightly behind her hand lest she hyperventilate, but her face grew redder and, no longer able to hold her breath, her chest heaved faster and faster to the drum roll.

A moment before the long roll would have concluded she bolted from the throne, got around the startled man and sprinted for the exit.

x

She'd been gone for the next dance. Jordan Hampton had joined a flustered Ducky as Abby's substitute, and it was well on five minutes after that reel concluded before Abby returned to the table. Ducky had offered his sincerest apologies for her embarrassment, but she made it perfectly clear to all - unnecessary to any who know him - that Ducky had been a gentleman and hadn't touched her, and that _she _was sorry for having run out as she had.

As soon as was discreet, Michelle and Sammy Sky, seated on either side of her, had leaned close and Michelle whispered, barely over the music, "Where'd you run off to?"

"The ladies room hand dryer," was the whispered reply.

"Why?" Sammy had asked.

"To dry my _panties_!"


	12. Grilling the Victim

Chapter Twelve  
Grilling the Victim

Investigating the tragic though at first quite mysterious death of the otherwise healthy Cheryl Keitt had been a challenge. That she'd died very shortly before an auto crash and fire had claimed the life of Navy Commander Robert Ventura had been a double tragedy for his widow Darla Keitt Ventura. In the course of seemingly minutes Darla had lost her sister and husband, one to apparently causeless suffocation, the other to fire.

As the only survivor of a pair of mysterious and circumstantial deaths, Darla Ventura had come under intense scrutiny. The truth, however, had been stranger than anyone had imagined.

Darla Ventura had not murdered her sister. In remodeling their hillside summer home, Robert had lined the room with impermeable plastic, suffocating the sleeping woman while leaving - he thought - no forensic evidence of his involvement in murder.

That Cheryl Keitt, unknown to Robert as a houseguest, had been the one to die rather than Darla had been the first complication to his plot. The second was when, driving hurriedly down the dark hillside, ostensively going to town for help but actually escaping the consequences of a disastrous snafu in his plan, he'd driven off the dark cliffside and crashed. The plot came to an ironic end when his broken and incinerated body had been found at the foot of the cliff.

Or had he?

Evidence in his computer had revealed the rest of his plot. He'd planned to disappear after a suitable time and Alan Slater would appear somewhere in the world to enjoy the largess of Robert Ventura's insured estate. Tragically for him, that part of the plot had never materialized. Robert Ventura was dead and would, in due time, follow Cheryl Keitt - rather than Darla Ventura - to the grave.

That is, until it had been learned that Robert Ventura is not the charred corpse on Ducky's autopsy table.

x

"Okay," Gibbs says at precisely ten o'clock, having generously given his team three hours this morning to compile and interpret yesterday's evidence and clues, "if Ventura isn't in Ducky's cooler, who is - and where's Ventura?"

He'd ordered Ziva yesterday evening to contact Sheriff Jung to get the answer to this question. Now her only answer is a question. "And is he alone in this murder / identity switch plot?"

That is another unresolved question, one of too many. Darla Ventura might be the inoffensive and oblivious victim of her husband's scheme or they might have worked together in preparing the death trap and luring Cheryl Keitt into the room and she is the actual target. Nothing has been established that completely rules out that version of the plot.

Therefore Gibbs has ordered Ziva and Michelle, in this early morning, to escort Darla Ventura downstairs from the rooms where she's been kept since being removed from the Safe House and into Interrogation Two.

The women offer no explanation for the sudden summons and escort, merely transport her to the orange cinderblock-lined basement and leave her unceremoniously at Gibbs' mercy.

When Ventura enters the drab grey cell, the door closes firmly behind her and Gibbs gives his most forbidding glare. "Sit down."

"What are–?"

"Sit down." If she is the innocent victim, he'll apologize - maybe - for what he's about to do, but after three days on this case she needs to convince him that she's innocent.

When she's seated opposite him at the table and as nervous as he intends her to be, he opens a folder between them. She instantly looks away from the burnt-out and partially melted wreck of the Crown Victoria resting on its right side within a blackened and charred dead zone. The burnt out area at the foot of the hill is 150 feet in diameter. "This is how we found your husband's car."

She shatters faster and more thoroughly than he'd anticipated. It's many long moments before she can squeeze out anything intelligible. "He tried to kill me, but he didn't deserve this." She's gone, in a matter of hours, from grieving widow to grieving victim of an elaborate murder plot still grieving for her husband - or has she?

Gibbs knows from Marie Watson and the other female agents that backed her up that Ventura had gone through the grief, anger and denial stages in the way she seems to do a lot of things he's noted since he met her; disjointedly. Then again, no matter what the headshrinkers would have one believe, there is neither a standard pattern nor clear cut and distinct stages.

But right now he's more interested in her reaction to facts he intends to put out to her.

"He wasn't in the car."

She takes this shot between the eyes and it rocks her. "You said he was dead."

"Someone's dead. It's not your husband."

x

She doesn't rally quite as fast. "Who is he?"

"That's what we're trying to find out. Ever hear of Alan Slater?"

"Is that who died?"

"We don't think so."

"Then what the hell are you talking about?" She gathers anger like a cloak, her voice rising erratically. "You tell me Bob's dead; two days I believe he's dead and then you tell me he tried to kill me and you move me from my house to a strange place to back to my house and I almost die along with your girl and you start tearing the house apart and then you put me in a cell and then you bring me down here and tell me Bob's _not _dead and you don't know who is and you ask me about someone named Slayer and say he's not dead either AND WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?"

Gibbs likes the anger, if not the volume. An angry subject doesn't lie well.

"When did you first see your husband that day?"

"I told you! After he picked up the lumber for the dog houses!"

"Strucker's said he picked that up at 2:30."

"What the hell are you talking about? He told me they weren't ready until evening!"

"By then he was in a barber shop, bowling alley and then a diner. We figure he did much of that after he called you but he had the building supplies in his car by 2:30."

"HE CAME HOME AT TEN O'CLOCK!"

That's one of the few things that witness statements almost bear out, though there's still a gap between the time the last witness they'd found could place him in town and when he'd allegedly returned home.

"How was your relationship with Cheryl Keitt?"

"Perfect."

x

He's never known a perfect relationship. "Whose idea was it to have her come with you from New York?"

"Mine," she snaps, still too angry to look for a reason for this question. They were discussing Bob, not Cher.

"Why?"

"What why? I hadn't seen her in a long time, she's between assignments, I wanted to spend a few days with her. How's it your business?"

"She's dead."

"I KNOW SHE'S DEAD!"

"You're the beneficiary on her Life Insurance."

"WHAT THE FUCK DIFFERENCE DOES THAT MAKE?" Darla rockets to her feet. "SHE'S DEAD, WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH LIFE INSURANCE?"

"Let's go over your statement again," he says in calm counterpoint to her fury. She's too angry to make even simple connections and keeping her there may shake out more information. "You said you and Cheryl Keitt arrived around what time?"

"I DON"T KNOW WHAT TIME!"

"Please, Mrs. Ventura, sit down."

"WHY?"

"Because I asked nicely."

She gapes at him, fury short-circuited by astonishment, and she collapses into the chair.

"What about your relationship with your husband, was it good?"

She gestures vaguely, the rapid and capricious changes in subject and the emotional roller-coaster he'd forced her to ride have completely disconcerted her. Her husband just tried to murder her, did murder her sister.

"A good - we have a good rela - but he tried to–" Grief, one of too many chaotic emotions warring beneath the surface, breaks through and she cries out loudly: "WHY'D he try to kill me? WHY'D HE KILL CHER? What'd I do to him? It's not FAIR!"

Gibbs is satisfied that that's the truest thing she's said in this entire debacle. Though there's no direct evidence that she didn't do it, he's sure that when Cheryl Keitt went to sleep that afternoon Darla Ventura didn't know her sister wasn't going to wake up. He's also sure she didn't retain the composure or shrewdness to sabotage Commander Ventura's car while he dealt with his sister-in-law's corpse.

Rather, Robert had told his wife to go to bed following the long drive from - he thought - Pennsylvania, had remained in town for over seven extra hours and had been surprised to return home and find his wife alive - and doubly surprised to find his sister-in-law dead.

But why - and how - had he done it?

xx

Back at his desk, with Ventura returned to Holding under the care of Marie Watson, Gibbs ponders that question and its associated one. If the body in Ducky's autopsy suite isn't Ventura, who is it? "Ziva, what've you got from Sheriff Jung on Missing Persons?"

"When I spoke to him last there was no one in town who was unaccounted for."

"When was that?"

"Two hours a– I shall call him," she declares, reaching for the phone before Gibbs can tell her.

Instead he reaches for his own phone and hits the intercom combination. A few moments later: /Thank you for calling Station L-A-B-Y. You're on the air with the fabulous Abby Sciuto./

She sounds like she's preparing too well for that television special Shepherd told him about. "Abs, have you identified whoever was in that car?"

/Not yet, Gibbs. Aside from being char-broiled, it's really hard to get fingerprints without hands./

"What about identifying marks?"

/ His most identifying mark is soot./

"Dental features?"

/Now there you have a shot. Not dental - can you imagine how many teeth there are in just this part of the world? Over three hundred ninety five billion, nine-/

"_Abby_."

/Ducky found and sent down a bridge, I won't bore you with between what and what tooth numbers, suffice it to say upper right jaw. They're in crappy condition, I'm trying to find enough class characteristics or an ID number that'll help./

"They ID number teeth?"

/Bridges and yes, makes it easier to track if something needs to be done. They can be used to ID bodies but they're not meant to sit in a fire for three hours. It I do the cleaning too fast it'll fall apart./

"Best speed."

/Always told you I was a–/

x

"Abby?" No answer. He slaps the speaker button while pulling open the desk drawer where he stores his weapon. "Abby?" he calls again, more sharply as the other agents yank out their own weapons from desk drawers, already out of their seats. "_Abby_!"

Strike three. They're on their way to the rear staircase when Gibbs speakerphone returns to life.

/Hey Gibbs, Merry Christmas./

The agents pull up on their charge, Gibbs returns to his desk and leans over the phone. "Not even Easter, Abby." He'll deal with the rest later.

/Tell Michelle Jimmy just walked in and he's got three knees, two knobby and one charred artificial./

"He does not have knobby knees," Michelle mutters and ignores Gibbs' look.

"What are you talking about?"

/Ventura - I mean 'John Doe' - had a knee replacement./

"Why didn't the x-ray find it?"

/Oh,/ Palmer's voice cuts in, /we didn't really x-ray down that far, just to the hips, when we thought it was Ventura and were just looking for a Cause of Death. Today we took, that is I took, a complete set and Commander Ventura's records, which came with this morning's courier, didn't show a knee replacement so Doctor Mallard excised it and sent me up with–/

/Okay, Palmer, you don't have to give a blow-by-blow,/ Abby cuts in, stopping the man later than Gibbs would have had he been in reach. /Gibbs, this doesn't look as bad. I'll get an ID and call when I have something./

Abby's tone, as she cuts the circuit, conveys she knows well just how likely it is Gibbs will wait upstairs for a call-back.

Tony notices Michelle's lips pressed tightly as she returns to her own desk. "The gremlin just can't seem to condense."

Michelle looks back to him with a sweet smile and the tone of her lengthy reply is kind and loving. Her answer, however, is in Chinese and he doubts her sincerity.

When he looks to Ziva settling behind her desk, she smirks at him.

xx

"Who is he?" Gibbs asks over the raucous noise Abby calls music when he bursts through the lab's rear door and up behind the scientist. She's half-bent over her freestanding table with a soft brush in her right hand, a charred artificial joint braced in her left. Today she's wearing another black tee shirt he really doesn't want to see the front of and a red plaid pleated 'schoolgirl' skirt that could really be several inches longer.

"Computers work in nanoseconds," Abby admonishes him, not straightening or glancing back, "Sciutos work in milliseconds or so mom used to say about dad, but nothing works in Gibbseconds."

"Maybe you should try it."

She continues stroking the brush carefully over the surface of the joint. "Gibbs, when I raise a number a database is going to tell me who manufactured it. Their records will show what hospital or clinic or whatever it was shipped to and _their _records will tell me who received it and then a crapload of records will tell me where he is and then I'll call you. But that's either a lot of calls and being put on hold or else a lot of warrantless hacking you don't need to know about to maintain your veneer of plausible deniability, so why don't you go crack the whip on someone else?"

"They're not making as much progress."

"_Well_."

He grabs a rolling chair and positions it near the computer console across the room behind her. She sighs, continuing to work bent over the table.

The music coming from her radio changes to a less frantic, in fact considerably slower and more sensual beat and in a few seconds she's slowly swiveling her hips, gently swaying them back and forth.

Seated behind her, Gibbs becomes very aware of just how short her plaid skirt is. Bent over, there's not enough material in the somewhat raised garment to hide her...

"Abby."

"Yes, Gibbs?" she asks, her attention on her work as her hips sway softly.

"Do you have to do that?"

"Do what?" she asks innocently, adding a particularly saucy accent to her hip movement.

"_That_."

"It's just exercise, Gibbs; helps keep me limber when I'm on my feet for so long."

She dips her lower back, the effect raising the skirt another inch; not quite reaching the level of her panties. Seated low behind her, she knows his view is very good; she's calculated his eye-line and the length of her hem precisely and adds an oval movement to the gyration, though never quite enough.

Ten seconds later she hears the chair pop as Gibbs' weight is removed. "Call me when you have a name."

The last word of the command came from outside the room and she smiles, confident she'll work in uninterrupted solitude for quite some time to come.

xxx

When Abby's call comes in, Gibbs is still not happy with her but providing the name of the deceased decoy does a lot toward restoring his good mood, almost enough to forgive her for her shameless one-upmanship - or one-upwomanship. He does break the contact a little more sharply than usual, able from her tone to picture the smirk on her lips.

He immediately dials the number for Webster Springs' Sheriff's office and is soon connected to Sheriff Jung. He engages the speaker phone so his team may have the information directly.

"Sheriff, my agent told you the body in Commander Ventura's car isn't Ventura. We've identified him as Aaron Lauber.

/Lauber, huh? Wait a second./ It's considerably more than a second. /Agent Gibbs, Lauber's not missing, he's dead./

Across the bullpen he hears DiNozzo mutter "he is now" but because of the speaker phone he places the 'wake-up call' on account.

"How long ago did he die?"

Again there's a long interval; he expects Jung is receiving a file because the sounds of papers now filter through the circuit.

/About two months ago. He died of a stroke, not much suspicious. He was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery./

"I expect he's a Missing Person again."

/I'll get a man out there./ The phone line has no trouble conveying Jung's feelings. Gibbs isn't sure if it's a supposed murderer escaping almost under their noses, an alleged desecration of a buried corpse or how the Sheriff's Department will look to the Maryland State Troopers; probably a combination of all three.

/Anything else?/

"Commander Ventura's alive. What're the best ways out of the area?"

/Car rental on the highway but that's not likely if you want to be 'dead'. There's a Greyhound runs through town with another 'Park and Ride' by the VFW Post. Four to eight busses up and down the route each day, I'd leave on the first one I could get on. If he got out that way no one might see him or care. He could pay cash to board, word he was dead took more than a day to spread. It made the local radio but still a lot of people might not know./

"Call back when you get details."

/Count on it./


	13. Picking up a Fare

Chapter Thirteen  
Picking up a Fare

"DiNozzo, get on the line–"

"With Greyhound, any cash paying customers out of Webster Springs."

"Palmer."

"Still researching Alan Slaters. There are five on the East Coast; I've eliminated an 82 year old man and a 21 year old who's confirmed as a student overseas, Eaton. Still tracking the other three."

"How are you coming with that BOLO?" He'd ordered a 'Be On the Look Out' on both names Robert Ventura alias Alan Slater.

"Checked ten minutes ago, no hits."

"Check again. Ziva, assume he didn't take Greyhound, what other ways out are there?"

"Checking, but I agree with the Sheriff."

"So do I. He'll pay cash, lay low. DiNozzo, what are the routes of busses running through Webster?"

"No good news, boss. The buses go each way, twenty-four stops north with driver turnovers in two depots winds up in Trenton, New Jersey, while if he made a scheduled connection with another southbound bus he could've gone on clear to Savannah, Georgia."

"How're you gonna narrow that down, DiNozzo?"

"Depends on Palmer's BOLO," he replies, managing to divert focus down the room.

"The BOLO," she replies, "covered the Washington/Virginia/Maryland area. I'm expanding them now to cover from New Jersey through Georgia."

"If Ventura left on the 20th, it'll take him 'till tonight to get to either end of the lines."

"I do not believe he is doing that," Ziva announces.

x

"Why not?" Gibbs demands when she leaves the pronouncement hanging.

"The natural act of a frightened fugitive is to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as possible. But Commander Ventura is not a frightened fugitive."

"No, he planned these details over months."

"If it worked," Ziva continues, "he was going to be the grieving widower of a wife who died of unknown causes while he was miles away being seen by dozens of people all over town. He had a haircut, bowled two games, ate out and when he got home Darla Ventura would have been dead."

"And he would have been blameless," Michelle agrees.

"Though Cheryl Keitt did suffocate - and Michelle and Darla Ventura almost did - Ducky found no evidence of _murder _on or about the body. Before the plot was discovered, Ducky was on the verge of declaring the Cause to be 'Undetermined'."

"Alan Slater was Plan B," Gibbs wraps it up. "If Darla Ventura didn't die, he was going to concoct some reason to be at that open guard rail and he would disappear. He had the lumber, the body, the Will and Insurance."

"Sounds great," DiNozzo concurs. "All we have to do is find him."

"Well?"

DiNozzo is caught short. "Well, what, boss?"

"_Find him_."

"I think I have," Ziva announces triumphantly.

x

"Are you going to make me say a magic word?"

"I thought that was the Probette's bag."

"Not smart, DiNozzo."

"There are 5 Alan Slaters on the East Coast," Ziva reminds them, getting a stranglehold on the discussion and unwilling to relinquish it, "but re-including the two Michelle has excluded, only 4 have been showing consistent financial activity over the past year. The Alan Slater who resides at Brown Square, Rochester, New York has not."

"Rochester, New York?" DiNozzo's disgusted tone sums up all their feelings, and a look to Michelle and her answering shrug confirms the reason. Western New York is beyond the range of even the expanded BOLO.

"In fact, he has only in the past three months begun any significant activity of any kind."

"DiNozzo, how long will it take him to reach there?"

"Amtrak and the like out of New York you need photo IDs, same with planes. There's a record by name. But he could connect with an Amtrak along the route and might bypass the ID for the right amount – or he could be using the 'Slater' ID, more likely that. He can be Slater by paying cash and using Slater's photo ID." He types quickly and uses the mouse to open and shift through various web pages. "Laying low and paying cash instead of a credit card trail, he could hook up with a train toward Niagara Falls and that train, leaving New York City in the early morning, would take about seven hours to reach Rochester. He could be there by late today."

Gibbs opens his cell phone, speed dialing Norfolk Base. Norfolk is two hours away as anyone else on the road drives. "_Gear up_."

xxx

While the agents rush to the base, a word that takes on special significance when applied to Gibbs, who is intent upon obtaining fast air transport to Rochester Airport, Sheriff Jung contacts them.

/You were right. Lauber's gone, just the box left. Family's gonna throw a fit./

Gibbs had never doubted the grave would be empty, and it's just another piece of the puzzle confirmed and slipped into place.

/Groundskeeper would never have noticed if not that spring grass had begun to kick in and he made his rounds today. Grave is fresh dug./

"Can you fax us his records?" He'll give DiNozzo's PDA code, the fax will come in electronically. "Was he autopsied?" He doesn't think so, Ducky would have discovered that immediately.

/No Autopsy. He was Jewish. Died in the morning, in the ground by sundown./

'Cremated two months later,' Gibbs won't say it, though he's pretty sure that that funeral custom is why Lauber was chosen to serve as Ventura's decoy. The Commander knew that the ME's finding a previously autopsied body would've given the conspiracy away immediately. Too bad he hadn't thought it through well enough to know the plan couldn't have held together. It had fallen apart when the wrong woman had been killed.

Gibbs gives Jung the fax number that will run the papers through DiNozzo's unit and doesn't forget his thanks this time before breaking the connection.

xxx

Rochester, New York in the flatlands near the state's western end, is not far from the Canadian border. It's so close, in fact, that Gibbs is certain 'Alan Slater' will one day take a vacation there and a third person will take up Canadian residence. How many identities will NCIS be obliged to trace? He won't guess at the plan, for it ends now.

The Amtrak station on the edge of the city is cool in post mid-March, but the crispness of the early afternoon air invigorates the body and sharpens the mind. One can forget the size of the city, forget the urban and urbane surroundings and relax, far away from Washington.

Outside the depot, a huge parking lot is skirted by a taxi line, each cab approaches the depot's entrance under the direction of the dispatcher posted near the main door.

The grey haired man with clipboard and company jacket turns to the man just now exiting the building. "Cab, sir?"

"Yes, to Frankfort Street, Brown Square." The dispatcher quotes a price. "Fine."

Raising the clipboard, the grey haired man signals to a younger, tall, thin man who brings his car, a Rambler, into place and gets out. Receiving the destination, the cabbie takes the suitcase from the middle aged man and stows it in the Rambler's rear, opens the curbside rear door and admits his passenger.

As the driver closes his door, the left rear door opens and a tall, black haired woman gets in. "Excuse me," is as far as the surprised passenger gets.

"Welcome to Rochester, Commander Ventura," the woman says, her exotic accent proclaiming she isn't local.

Ventura feels the blood drain from his face, only partially because of the Sig Sauer pointing at his side.

In the front passenger seat another woman sits up, turns to him, and the Asian woman points an identical weapon at his face. "Takes your breath away, doesn't it?"

He yanks at the doorknob - they can only kill him once - but the grey-haired dispatcher is leaning on the door and his right hand holds the lock down. "I hope you brought enough fare, it's a long trip to Washington."

"And I expect a good tip," the cabbie tells him as he turns, emphasizing his point with his own gun.

xxx

Gibbs, DiNozzo, David and Palmer watch their prisoner through the plate glass window of the darkened Observation One chamber. A jet return was faster than Ventura had wanted, and had undoubtedly added to his own breathless state. No one feels any sympathy.

"Is it just me," DiNozzo asks generally, "or does he seem depressed?"

"You mean because his elaborate scheme fell apart faster than one of your dates?" Gibbs elaborates with a half-smile. "Yep."

DiNozzo withholds his opinion of this jibe – barely. "I'm looking forward to your breaking this guy."

"I'm not going to break him," Gibbs says, glancing through the file folder in his hand by the light of Interrogation One.

"_Yeah_?" DiNozzo perks up. The only thing better than watching the Master at work is doing the breaking himself.

Gibbs passes the folder to the petite Asian woman on his right. "You are."

Even in the dim light, they see the color drain from Michelle's startled features.

x

"M - m - m - me?" She feels her blood run cold as she holds the file. "B - bu - but–"

"Wasn't a suggestion, Palmer," he tells her. "Get in there and don't come out without a confession."

The fear had only seemed total a moment ago; now she manages to look even more frightened. "B - but - sir–"

He cocks his thumb at the door behind them, his hard expression intended to silence her. She doesn't move, he suspects she's frozen and he hardens his glare until she breaks.

"Yes, sir."

Her voice was tinier than he's heard it in months. She walks out so stiffly he thinks she's afraid she'll shatter if she speeds up.

When she's gone, DiNozzo turns to Gibbs. "Five gets you ten she'll be too scared to go in there."

"She will handle it," Ziva predicts.

"Has to learn some day," Gibbs tells them.

"She's scared," Tony maintains.

"She doesn't know it, but she was scared of this bastard before she ever knew he was alive. His trap nearly killed her. She not only has to learn how to interrogate, she has to face him down, or he's going to scare her for the rest of her life."

x

Michelle lets go of Ob 1's doorknob and reaches into the pocket of her skirt, pulls out a Kleenex to wipe her wet palms. Gibbs does all the interrogations, or Agent DiNozzo does, or Ziva does – or Tim does. She hadn't thought – No, it's not that she avoided it, it just never came up. She didn't interrogate – the scary people do it. But she knew, in her mind, the day would come – but in her heart she didn't. It doesn't. It does.

It has.

She stuffs the tissue back into her pocket harder than she needs to, but when she pulls her hand back out, it's still shaking.

'I have to go in there. I have to go in and get answers, however long it takes. How much time do I have? Interrogations take hours. Maybe I'll fail? Maybe I'll do such a horrendous job they'll–. No! No no no! No, I'm not going to fail! Not on my first interrogation. Not ever! _No_!'

She takes a step toward Interrogation and the orange cinderblock corridor is ten miles long.

x

She's at the door far too soon, reaches for the knob but pulls her hand back. 'I can't.' She backs away. 'Goddess. _Venus_,' she appeals more fervently to her patroness Goddess. 'Mary, help me.'

The folder tucked under her left arm, she holds her cold, shaking hands held to her lips, her tremulous breath hot. She tries to force herself to step forward again. The fear puts up a shield she can't step through.

'Jimmy, _help_. Please. Someone's going to come out and I'll be _humiliated_. Special Agent Gibbs will never trust me with anything ever again.' She tries for anger, anger at herself, anger at Ventura. Anger helps break through fear but she's not angry.

xx

"She's not going in." DiNozzo narrates the obvious.

"She will," Ziva predicts, confident in her partner. She can't remember her first interrogation, she supposes it was a training exercise when she was sixteen.

"She's not going to do it," DiNozzo declares a few seconds later, stepping toward the door.

"Sta-ay," Gibbs commands, makes sure Tony obeys both syllables.


	14. Interrogation

Chapter Fourteen  
Interrogation

'Damn it, I have to go in there!" But though her hand hovers impotently before the doorknob Michelle can't free herself from the knowledge that this isn't the same as her last interrogation. 'Who am I kidding? That wasn't an interrogation, that was a _confrontation_.' She'd gone, already mad, into the Conference Room where they were holding Catherine Leher during the search for Reverend O'Mallory and had browbeaten the girl, breaking her in record time.

'Record time - give me a break. I went in pissed and I smashed a girl who was already half broken.'

_Use magic_, a voice in her heart seems to say. _No one will know and you can break this one just as cleanly. A spell will get all the resistance out of the way_.

'_No_!' Now really angry, she reaches out, twists the knob as though to break it and shoves the door.

She sees she's startled Ventura, who sits shackled and cuffed to the table. The satisfaction of that lets her push aside anger and shove through fear, lets her pretend poise and confidence as she goes to the chair opposite his. Her back momentarily to the prisoner she clenches her eyes shut, hating that she has to face her team mates to do it. She clutches the circle, five pointed Wicca star and cross charm tightly in her fist, not caring that her friends can see. Venus won't be of much help so, with a silent apology to her patron Goddess, she calls instead upon the warrior nature of Minerva, needing her strength, her ruthlessness. Turning her back to the faux mirror and to her prey, she sits down and sets the file folder upon the table. 'Start from a position of strength,' she admonishes herself. 'I've hunted this prey, now to finish him off and carve his carcass for dinner.'

"Why did you decide to kill your wife?"

x

"I'm not admitting anything."

"You hardly need to, you could get a lawyer right now. It won't help. We have so much evidence on you I didn't want to carry it." She opens the folder, wishing she'd spent more time looking through it and less time panicking. Fortunately, she recognizes the item on top; it's in a large measure the reason for the anger she cherishes the heat of, nurtures the fire. She turns the 8 x 11 copy about, slides it out of the folder and toward the middle of the table.

"Copy of your order for 775 square feet of plastic." The next thing is a color photo of the bedroom wall, under the wooden panel she and Agent DiNozzo had ripped off. Several wide horizontal lines of glue mar the smooth surface.

"Fiberglass is insulation, plastic is not."

"I heard it is. I was just keeping the cold out."

She's disappointed. 'So this is his tactic, play dumb? Well, I can play that better than anyone.' She morphs the self-depreciating smile into a predatory one.

The next item in the folder is an enlargement of Alan Slater's New York non-driver ID card with Ventura's face. "Alan Slater needed a non-Driver ID because your only car is already registered to Robert Ventura," she pulls out a photo of the incinerated wreck sitting in the Evidence garage, "and your car isn't going anywhere."

"What happened to it?" He makes a great show of the shocked, outraged owner. There's little point as they already have him using Slater's ID.

"You treat this as a joke."

"I'm serious, what happened to my car? Did someone steal it and set fire to it?"

The damage from the end-over-end rolling crash down the hillside is quite impressive.

'Special Agent Gibbs sometimes spends hours on interrogations; this is going to take all afternoon.' "Why did you try to kill your wife?"

"I love my wife."

"Why did you kill your sister-in-law, Cheryl Keitt?"

"I didn't."

'I wonder what Special Agent Gibbs would say if I reached out and head-slapped this bastard? No, I know what he'd say. Rule 24: 'Never torture a prisoner physically; do it to his head.' Maybe I could claim I misunderstood?'

"All right, let's cut to the chase, can we? We have all the evidence we need to bring this to trial, so much evidence I nearly hurt my back lugging it down from Holding. We have you building a death trap that killed Cheryl Keitt. We have you for grave robbery and desecration of a body. We have you for fraud–"

"And you don't have a single witness to any of it. All the so-called evidence you think you have is circumstantial. The only thing you have witnesses to is that I was in town, miles away, when Cheryl died. I didn't touch her. Only Darla - who _was _with her - did that."

As a lawyer she knows how much evidence they have and its power and wishes she were trying this case instead of sorting through it for answers; then she wouldn't have to seek clarification of the ludicrous. "Are you saying you blame Darla for her sister's death?"

"Why not? She was there, I wasn't. How do I know she didn't kill her? She's her sister, she'd have a reason to kill her, I don't. "

'And people call Special Agent Gibbs a bastard.' "We have all the direct evidence we need. But I'm not talking about evidence, circumstantial or direct. All I'm asking is one simple question."

"What?"

"Why?"

For a long time Ventura is silent. He doesn't look at her but Michelle senses she's scored some points by stressing the depth and comprehensiveness of their evidence.

After what seems like a full minute Ventura turns back to her. "Thought."

x

Michelle stares at him, certain she's missed something. "Excuse me?" She knows she's just put herself in a position of weakness and she'll pay for it later, but she can't help herself.

"I'm not saying I did anything or ever would, but if I did it'd be because she's thoughtless. She didn't think about inviting Cheryl, she just did it. She didn't think about consulting me before redecorating the house - I saw what she did when she was supposed to be asleep - she just did it. That typifies her whole life."

Michelle reaches for the charm hanging before her breasts, the inch and a half wide silver five-pointed star within a circle, the five intersecting lines enclosing a cross. For a moment she holds the circle tightly, needing its comforting touch. But the gesture might be seen as a sign of weakness - it is - so she forces herself to let it go.

He's just confessed, callously, without remorse, to killing an innocent woman because his wife is inconsiderate.

"Get a divorce. Mental cruelty." 'Anything would've been better than killing her.'

"Pre-nup."

"What?"

"We signed a pre-nuptial agreement. If we divorce, she gets fifty percent of everything. I 'm the one who works, it's mine."

"Why didn't you just find a good lawyer? Anyone worth her shingle could find some way to nullify a pre-nuptial agreement. I've found flaws in the last two I came across that I could drive a semi through."

"Would you represent me?"

Michelle is sure her face, when the aggressive mask falls onto the floor, telegraphs her shock. "No."

"Why not?"

"Hell, I'd prosecute you first, but I'm not a practicing lawyer, I'm an NCIS Special Agent."

"Then you can't find any flaw in my pre-nup, and even if you could I'd have to pay years of alimony."

"So your solution to the drain on your wallet is to kill?"

"I'm not admitting anything."

Michelle would rather smack him, or do more, but she forces herself to lock away those feelings in that box within her soul wherein she keeps the worst of her negative feelings.

"Hypothetically, if you had - hypothetically - killed your wife, why do it with 775 square feet of plastic?"

"I didn't kill her."

"You did kill Cheryl Keitt."

""No I didn't. I have a hundred witnesses that I was in town when your own ME would tell you she died. Darla was with her."

'We're going in circles,' Michelle chides herself. 'Ducky already answered that question; there were no marks at all on Keitt, no forensic evidence in or on the body to show how she died. Asphyxia was the answer, 'how' was the question, and until the plastic secret of the booby-trapped room had been revealed there had been no indication as to _why _Keitt had died. How Darla Ventura had almost died. How _she _had almost died. Michelle remembers the terror, the gasping for breath that wouldn't come, the weight of her lungs as they tried in vain to suck in enough oxygen...

No. To allow that thought admits madness; but it's already in and she can't keep it out any longer. She'd almost _died_, and Jimmy wouldn't know why. Worse, she'd had the chance to tell him and she hadn't. She'd kept the secret to spare him, even though he'd have to be the one to autopsy her dead body to find out why his wife had...

The room is too small and getting smaller. The air conditioner is on but the breeze touching her wet face does nothing to ease the stuffiness. She pushes the table, boosts herself up, clings to the table and seriously considers not withholding her lunch any longer.

She staggers to the door, pulls it open and falls out.

x

Getting the door shut, she falls across the hall into the opposite orange cinderblocks and hears the door to Ob 1 open. She can't force herself to look up.

"Hey, you okay?" The voice is normally hard, always commanding, but now there's a touch of almost alien compassion. She shakes her head, brings her right hand to her face and wipes the cold sweat, feeling she's only smearing it.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, barely able to manage that.

"Get out of here."

x

There are so many ways he could've said that and be the martinet, the demanding one, the boss, the one who never shows weakness. But there's mercy in the tone - this time - and it gives her the strength to flee.

She makes it around the left turn in the orange corridor and her stomach starts to settle. Gibbs will go in and break him. She'd softened him up.

Hell, Ventura had softened _her _up and broke her in front of her team and she'll never, _ever_, live this down.

Special Agent DiNozzo is going to destroy her and she'll be helpless to defend herself. Ziva will look at her contemptuously for the rest of her career. Special Agent DiNozzo will make the rest of that probably very short career a living Hell.

"I don't care!" she slaps the unyielding metal of the elevator door. "Let them. I deserve it."

But before they reach her and can start to destroy her, she has something she has to do.

Pushing the elevator button, she straightens up, forces her body to comply and when the door slides open she steps through.

x

The sub-basement is cool and silent, quickly and very unpleasantly chilling the cold sweat that covers her body as she stands between the elevator and autopsy doors. She doesn't allow herself to think about what she's doing because if she does she'll lose her nerve. She doesn't allow any thought at all until the Autopsy Suite doors slide open before her.

Jimmy and Ducky are on opposite sides of the closest Examination table. She has no idea who the black man they're examining is and she doesn't care. "Jimmy?"

Her husband looks up, his face screened by the protective plastic mask, his hands in the chest of the still man. "'Chelle?"

"Jimmy, could I talk to you?"

Ducky looks back over his shoulder, and she sees the mask covering his face is smeared by a streak of blood. "We're a little busy at the moment, Agent Palmer." Though his tone is kindly, his formal address emphasizes the message he feels no need to voice.

At any other time she'd never imagine doing this but she steps up to them. "I _really_ need to speak to you." She steps past them to the silver door of the supply room, opens it, steps inside, closes it behind her.

x

Ducky and Jimmy look at one another, surprised by this uncharacteristic behavior, neither quite knowing what to say about it until finally Ducky suggests "Perhaps you should talk to the young lady."

"I guess so." Releasing the bloody lung he'd been holding aside, he pulls off his latex gloves and throws them into the basket at the foot of the table. He looks at the blood smeared scrubs he's wearing and finds two unstained spots to grasp, lifts the top off and disposes of it in the same receptacle. He'll get a fresh top before he returns. Clad in tee shirt and blue scrub pants, he follows his wife into the store room.

She's facing the far corner near the small specimen jars used for bullets and other tiny discoveries and when the door closes behind him she stiffens, her body nearly rigid. "'Chelle?"

She turns. "Jimmy, I lied to you."

He blinks, surprised and taken aback by this unexpected - and very ill-timed - confession. "Honey, what lie did–?"

"I nearly died."

"_What_?" After that, he doesn't care about timing. "When?"

"Maryland, last time I was at the Ventura house; and I wasn't going to tell you. I said you had too much to worry about."

"I don't–"

"Special Agent Gibbs said I shouldn't have kept it from you, that a lie of omission is still a lie but I didn't want you to know I almost suffocated like Cheryl Keitt did in that booby-trapped bedroom and I didn't want you worrying about me in the field but it would be worse if I died and you didn't know until it was too late but I wanted to protect you and I can't protect you from the dangers of this life any more than you can protect me and Special Agent Gibbs says marriage is about communication and he's divorced so many times because he didn't communicate and Robert and Darla Ventura never communicated about anything anymore until finally he got so fed up with her that instead of trying to resolve it or divorce her he decided to kill her and concocted this elaborate scheme and took into account a lot of variables including a new identity if he failed to kill her where he could make it look like natural causes no one would suspect him of but Cheryl Keitt died instead and he had to go to Plan B and it's because they never communicated anymore and I didn't communicate to you even when I almost died and you almost lost me and I'm sorry I don't ever want us to wind up like the Venturas because I didn't tell you things and I'm sorry and I promise it'll never happen again and I just want you to forgive me so will you forgive me?"

Jimmy stares at her, feeling shell-shocked by the barrage.

"Will you forgive me?"

"Ye– Yes. Yes, I forgive you."

She hurries to him, throws her arms about him, hugs him as tightly as she can. "_Thank you_."

He's still trying to sort through what she'd said.


	15. End of an Era

Chapter Fifteen  
End of an Era

Commander - soon to be former-Commander when the Navy finishes with him - Ventura has been removed to the Stockade on the Yard, his elaborate plan for murder and freedom unraveling faster than his career.

Special Agent DiNozzo and Ziva have already departed, and amazingly the hazing Michelle Palmer had expected hadn't materialized. DiNozzo, doubly amazingly, had even flashed her a 'thumbs up' signal before he left. Even Special Agent Gibbs has almost shockingly made it an early night, seemingly having no taste for lingering. Ventura, in the hands of the master, had broken but there'd been no surprises, just confirmation of what they'd already concluded. The entire sickening case is over and done, only the wounded now left to suffer.

Michelle, gathering her possessions, is prepared to meet Jimmy at the parking lot. The April sun is fading through the skylight, time to think of home and rest and forgetting. She gets up, takes a step toward the exit and her intercom beeps.

She sighs. She doesn't want to know who would call her at 1559 on a Friday. If it were the regular phone she'd keep going, leaving Dispatch to route the call to one of the Beta Shift teams, already on duty, but this is her intercom. She can't pretend ignorance, darn it.

Returning to her desk, she snatches up the receiver. "Hello." She doesn't want to sound friendly or accommodating.

/Ah, Agent Palmer./ Ducky's is the only voice she can never bring herself to mind hearing, and she determines to sound more cordial.

He, on the other hand, sounds grim. What could've happened, in the few hours since she's visited Autopsy so precipitously, to account for this grimness? /I'm glad to reach you before you left./

Cordiality is washed away by his tone. "What's wrong?" She tries to push back a surge of apprehension, but when her husband's boss, a.k.a. the Medical Examiner, calls when she's planning to meet her husband, she feels a twinge is justified.

/I need to see you right away./

His tone makes her heart slam against her ribs. "I'll be right down!"

She runs to the elevator.

xx

When she disembarks and nearly bursts through the door that's not opening quickly enough, Jimmy and Ducky are dressed in their 'civilian' attire. They're beside Ducky's desk and Michelle crosses the room to them in rush - but Jimmy appears mildly surprised to see her.

"Hi, Honey." He hugs and kisses her.

"What's _wrong_?"

He draws back, more deeply surprised by her apprehensive tone and expression but he doesn't get the chance to answer.

"_I_ asked your wife to join us, Mister Palmer," Ducky Mallard announces, now surprising them both. Michelle is uncertain why Ducky would summon her but not tell Jimmy, but apparently there's no disaster. She glances around the room, just to be sure.

Rather, he reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out a white envelope which he holds it out to Jimmy but in such a way that it comes almost between them. Jimmy takes the unsealed envelope, pulls out and unfolds a 5 by 8 silver certificate bordered in gold.

"What's this?" Michelle asks, feeling slightly foolish to ask it. This is quite evidently a $200 Gift Certificate to La Chateau Julienne.

"In recognition of Mr. Palmer's upcoming Medical Finals early next week. Having enough confidence in his proficiency, I felt a pre-test celebration is in order."

"Thank you, doctor," Jimmy says, shaking his mentor's hand when the surprise has faded enough.

"Yes, thank you." Michelle kisses his cheek, something she can see the elder man doesn't object to at all.

But then, to their renewed surprise, his smile disintegrates into a grim, regretful expression. "It's also, I'm afraid, intended as a consolation."

x

His grim tone obliterates their joy. "I don't understand," Jimmy confesses tonelessly.

Ducky rallies briefly. "Mr. Palmer, how long have you been my Assistant?"

"Since 2004," he replies, not sure where the conversation is going but not particularly liking it.

"And in that time, while attending Medical School part time, your service has been exemplary."

"Thank you." He definitely doesn't like the sound of this. Over the past few years, splitting his time between part-time work and study, he's reached the point where he's finally about to test for his Doctorate. By the end of the month, if all goes well, he'll be 'Doctor Palmer'. That's what the certificate in his hand is meant to commemorate.

Isn't it?

Ducky sighs, his manner grows grimmer. Michelle, holding her breath, watches Jimmy steel himself for what's obviously bad news.

x

"There's no easy way to say this," Ducky confesses. Michelle holds her breath tighter and grasps her husband's hand. It's cold. "I have been in consultation," Ducky continues, "_negotiation_, actually, with Director Shepherd for some time. As you know, NCIS' annual budget is up for review and reevaluation."

"I didn't know that," Jimmy says flatly. He'd spent every spare moment, when not engaged in autopsies, in intense study for next week's tests.

Michelle feels the cold hand within her chest grip her heart tighter as the temperature of Jimmy's hand drops further. She's fast-forwarded to what the man before them has such trouble saying - and to the difficulties they'll face.

"As I said," Ducky continues grimly, "there's no easy way to say this, and I have spent considerable effort negotiating with the Director on your behalf."

"I know you have," Jimmy says. He hadn't known any such thing, yet this man would do exactly that. He only wishes he'd had some clue - some warning - of the doom about to befall him. Them. In this economy, a single paycheck, even granting minimal unemployment insurance the government would pay...

"Unfortunately," Ducky says carefully, "the upcoming fiscal year's budget does _not_ include your continued employment as my Assistant."

x

"I understand," Jimmy says, not understanding at all, unable to push any tone into his voice. He'd have taken a cut over nothing at all - if he'd had some _warning_. He glances down at Michelle at his side, sees her silent pain. She won't say anything, nothing she could say can make the situation better. He releases her hand, folds the certificate and puts it in his jacket pocket. The pleasure it had represented is gone. He feels empty. He takes a deep breath, steels himself again. He doesn't feel anger - yet. He realizes he doesn't feel anything, except perhaps a mounting dread. He knows his friend did all he could. "How ... much longer do I have?"

Ducky reaches down to his desk, picks up from his 'In' box a large Inter-Office envelope. The tied package has a two inch bulge in the middle. He hands the envelope to Jimmy.

Jimmy can't feel it very well. It's heavy, almost, can't be papers, has to be something harder. His hands won't convey the sensations. He unties the envelope, reaches inside and finds a long, L-shaped piece of metal and pulls it out.

It's a desk-top ID shingle, white engraving on brown background, and bears only two lines: 'JAMES PALMER' and 'Deputy Medical Examiner'.

Stunned, feeling a kick to his heart, he barely hears Michelle's joyous cry and looks up into the beaming face of his mentor.

"Congratulations, my boy."

"I - nama - ab - blu - but–"

"The budget didn't, as I said, cover an 'Assistant' but negotiations over our _increased _budget did settle on a 'Deputy'. Of course, the rank applies only within NCIS and not even on _all_ the paperwork until you officially qualify as an ME some two years hence, but you will notice in your next check that it _does_ come with remuneration appropriate to a married gentleman of your status."

x

Jimmy tries to answer but he's yanked down into a very enthusiastic kiss which buys him a considerable number of seconds to find his voice.

"Thank you." He shakes Ducky's hand when Michelle lets him up.

"You are very welcome, my boy. You've earned it. Now the two of you get out and celebrate before someone calls us to a Crime Scene and we must resume work."

Next Episode: Exposed.  
There's no such thing as bad publicity, or so the pundits say. They're wrong.


End file.
